


Doubt Thou the Stars are Fire (MCUcraft)

by sonofzeal



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, StarCraft (Video Games), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Starcraft, Commander Sam, Depressed Steve, Down to earth Barton, Evil Loki (Marvel), Hot Mess Bruce, I have no idea what I'm doing, Infested Bucky, Infrequent Updates, M/M, MCU characters in the Starcraft story, MCUcraft, Morally Ambiguous Tony, Mysterious Nick, Other, POV Alternating, Science Bros, Stucky - Freeform, Stuckycraft, send help
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2019-07-18 10:07:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 40,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16116188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonofzeal/pseuds/sonofzeal
Summary: Written for MCU fans unfamiliar with the StarCraft universe.  This attempts to turn the "Wings of Liberty" campaign into a much broader and more compelling story.  Some early dialogue is taken more or less verbatim from SC2, other dialogue is heavily modified, and the plot diverges in subtle ways that become more significant as it goes.Steve Rogers is head of a band of notorious outlaws rebelling against a tyrannical regime spanning dozens of star systems.  Tony Stark is a brilliant engineer whose quick wit is matched only by the burdens he bears.  Bruce Banner is the frazzled head researcher at a terraforming colony.  Clint Barton is an elite government assassin on the run.  The Winter Soldier is the head of a ravenous alien swarm and possibly the greatest threat mankind has faced thus far.  And Loki has plans... oh yes, Loki has plans.Proofread by the incomparible Dani and nikkiscarlet........oh, and I really do apologize for the utter dearth of major female characters.  Neither SC2 nor MCU have especially good female representation, and something about the amalgam exacerbated that.  I'll see what I can do about that going forward, but no promises.





	1. Enemies and Friends (Finish the Job)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Steve solves problems by punching them in the face.
> 
> (SC2 Missions: Liberation Day, The Outlaws, Zero Hour)

 "...And in other news today, Emperor Pierce held a press conference commemorating the end of the so-called Hydra War some four years ago. Our own Karen Page was on the scene."

Steve Rogers took a swing at the punching bag, not that it accomplished much in the way of easing the ghosts of his past. The last few years may not have weakened him, but they had aged him noticeably. He hadn't shaved in months.

The TV chattered on.  Karen Page  was interviewing Emperor Pierce, and seemed to actually be asking the pointed questions. Lord knows how that woman kept her job.  Or her life.  "Emperor, the threat of a new Hydra invasion is still very real - but instead of expanding our fleets, you've squandered trillions on hunting down has-been rebels like Steve Rogers!"

"Well Miss Page, Steve Rogers represents a clear and present threat to these United Planets. He is, as you well know, an unscrupulous, lawless revolutionary bent on spreading fear and desertion across the sector. He and his ragtag band of miscreants have instigated open rebellion across seven worlds - and, need I remind you, have stolen vast amounts of United Forces weapons and hardware."

Steve's eyes wandered from the TV to a photo of Bucky Barnes - the first of his friends to fall to Pierce's ambition. They had both thought Pierce would help them make a better future. How wrong they had been.

"I assure you, this criminal will be brought to justice very soo-", but the sentence was interrupted by a thrown discus smashing straight through the TV set.

"It isn't over until it's over, you know." Steve, fully composed again, calmly collected his shield from the debris and keyed to pad for his communication rig. "Sam, are my troops ready yet?"

Sam Wilson responded, his voice crackling over the comm, "your forces are prepared and awaiting your orders, Captain. Uploading tactical data now." Sam was up on the Falcon, a Behemoth-class helicarrier they'd absconded with some time ago, but would be sitting this one out in orbit. Steve had convinced him it was more important to have the Falcon ready to run interference if any of Pierce's own helicarriers made an unexpected appearance, but mostly he wanted to prove a point. The Falcon could do the job, but it wouldn't inspire the people. It wouldn't make them believe they were capable of changing their own destiny and building a brighter future.

Steve nodded to the rig, his eyes shadowed but determined. "Good. It's time to suit up."

\---------------------------------------

New Brooklyn. Steve's old stomping ground, back before the First War, before Emperor Pierce's "United Planets" rose to power. Back in the days of the Confederacy, the government had treated the populace with callous disregard. Steve had done the best he could as Marshall, but when Alexander Pierce had recruited Steve into his rebellion, it had been with the promise of forging a new government across the Terran worlds, one that worked for the people rather than against them. He had believed. Bucky had believed.

But they'd both been betrayed, and now Pierce's regime was even worse than the Confederacy had been. Callous indifference had become active oppression, and the population on New Brooklyn was restless. Civil disobedience and street-art vandalism of Pierce's propaganda posters had led to martial law, but the ground forces were spread thin, and a simple nudge could be all it took to break their control and wrest a small but symbolic victory in the struggle for freedom.

All of which was why Steve was back, with a small squad of his Howling Commandos, near the United Forces logistics hub at the mining town of Backwater Station. The logistics hub was a keystone in the network here and housed the only ground-based ansible for off-world communication. Taking it down would prevent high command from knowing what happened here or issuing new commands to the local troops, and would keep the various ground forces separated at confused. A sizable garrison here had recently been pulled away, making this the perfect time to strike.

But trailers and prefab housing stood silent, and only the barking of stray dogs and the distant whine of machinery gave any indication of life. Mid-afternoon on a Saturday, there should have been people everywhere. Steve walked forward cautiously, expecting ambush and not finding any.

The streets were not quite empty though. A few blocks in, a pair of UF soldiers manning a simple roadblock took one look at the Howling Commandos and opened fire. They lasted all of about ten seconds until the rebels’ suppressing fire and the complete demolishion of the roadblock drove them to surrender with no more damage to the Commandos than some scuff marks and a graze on the shoulder of “Dum Dum” Dugan's armoured combat suit.

Forging on ahead, the distant sound of voices over loudspeakers soon led to the reason for the desertion of the streets - UF goons were corralling civilians into re-purposed prison transports. Steve crept closer to listen in as the sergeant in charge finished lecturing them about how they'd be given a meal when they reached the dig site, and how they'd be free to return home once the dig shift was completed. When one of the civilians tried to make a break for it rather than be forced into the transport, the sergeant casually shot him in the back.

Steve had known conditions here under Pierce's regime were tough, but conscription into work camps? It was worse than he had feared. And there was no time now to get into a better position. "They're shooting civilians! Move in," he called into his earpiece, anger and desperation in his voice. He couldn't let this happen, not on his watch.

A thrown shield ricocheted off one UF trooper and into another before returning miraculously to Steve's hand, but withering return fire from the remainders forced him back behind a nearby aircar. The Howling Commandos set up some crossfire, but it was looking to be a drawn out engagement until one of the civilians hucked an improvised Molotov cocktail at the UP sergeant. The ensuing confusion and panic gave Cap the opening he needed, and with some help from the citizenry mobbing one of the remaining guards, the fight was over quickly.

After ensuring the remaining civilians were uninjured, Steve checked the pulse of the one who'd been shot in the back. But the man was already dead.

One of the civilians, one who'd been standing next to the man who now lay sprawled face-down before them, put his hand on Steve's shoulder. "Thank you, Captain. Without you this would have been a lot worse. I knew you wouldn't forget us."

From the middle of the pack, another civilian shouted, "we're with you, Captain!" A cheer raised from the others.

Steve stood, then, sizing up the survivors with his piercing blue eyes, took a cleansing breath and nodding. "Five minutes ago, you were slaves on your planet, in your own streets. No more. Five minutes ago, you may have thought you couldn't fight back against your oppressors, but now you have, and you will again. I can't free this planet alone, but I can help you get what you need to do it for yourselves, and I can stand with you as we strike back at those who'd hold us down. Remember: Pierce can only control you if you let him. There's no way he can hold this planet if you say no. The central command node for the planet is two blocks from here, and I intend to knock it out, but what happens from there is up to you." He looked around the group, gazing into the eyes of each, and finished in a quieter voice. "I'm not going to lie – if you do this, some of you may not get to go home. But I know that, whatever you decide, you'll make the right decision."

And with that he was off.

Ten minutes later, the Backwater Station logistics hub was gutted, and United control of all urban centres was crumbling.

\---------------------------------------

 _...Princess Shuri opens veteran's hospital on Helios..._  
_...Korhal property boom will be short lived say analysts..._  
_...York VIII tsunami relief operation enters new phase..._  
_...SAT1 reports unusual activity in Char system, fleet put on alert..._  
_...This is UPN with Mitchell Ellison..._

"This is Mitchell Ellison, live from the UPN studios on Korhal. We've got a breaking story for you. Let's go live to our own Karen Page, on the fringe world of New Brooklyn.  Karen?"  
"Thank you, Mitchell. Rebel Steve Rogers has reappeared in a big way. He's attacked a United Planets depot near Backwater Station on New Brooklyn, seizing weapons and distributing them to the local populace."  
"Karen, I bet the locals are pretty nervous about having a notorious outlaw in their neighbourhood."  
"Actually, the people I talked to seemed really encouraged by the-"  
"Thanks Karen! You heard it here first - Steve Rogers, terrorizing the locals on New Brooklyn. When we return... are your kids using stim-packs?"

\---------------------------------------

The air was like a blast furnace in the empty gym Steve had claimed as his own. A boxing speedbag lay in the dust, newly dented along one side. The real work of establishing a new civilian government was going on three blocks over, but no noise of traffic intruded on his makeshift sanctum. Even the Howling Commandos knew to give him space when he was like this.

Pierce. His fault for not stopping him.

Bucky, betrayed and infested. The Winter Soldier. His fault for not being there.

Revolutions with noble rhetoric but the same tyrannical aims. His fault for not realizing in time.

Everything was his fault.

His fault.

Another speedbag failed to absorb a withering combination, flying off its chain to thud gracelessly next to the first. Its landing nearly covered the sound of a heavy, iron-clad footstep just inside the door.

Nobody should be in here yet. Especially not in full battle armour

Breathing hard, Steve's hand reached quietly for his shield. Fingers inched forward at every resounding step in the empty gym.

"Y'know, for the most wanted man in the sector, you aren't that hard to find. I had to come see it for myself. Cap, the people's spandex-clad hero."

Steve turned slow, leaving the shield where it was, but not forgetting its presence. "Tony Stark. Nice suit."

"Well you know what they say, it pays to be prepared." Tony's signature gold-on-red battle armour looked like it had definitely seen better days, but only a fool would forget how dangerous it was. Steve was no fool. They'd been allies years ago, even saved each other's lives a couple of times, but they'd never exactly been friends. And if Tony had been spending the last half decade in the United-controlled core worlds, why was he just looking him up now?

Instead, Steve just nodded. "I heard you were working for Pepper out on York VIII. What, did she finally kick you out of the house?"

"Something like that. And thanks for bringing up such a sensitive topic." Tony wandered through the gym with feigned carelessness, but Steve could read the tension on his face. Still, things hadn't come to blows yet, and that was as good a sign as any where he and Tony were concerned.

Tony fingered a picture on the wall: a downed Quinjet with the Howling Commandoes and some exuberant-looking New Brooklyn colonists. "This looks recent. This your doing, Steve?"

"Folks in these parts were ready to fight back against Pierce. Guess they just needed a little push."

"You still take this whole," Tony gestured vaguely in the air, "‘revolution’ thing pretty serious, then."

"Everyone needs a hobby, Tony." Steve tilted his head slightly. His version of a shrug.

Tony moved on to the next photo, another duo of locals posing with a dead hydralisk the size of a large jeep. Its insectoid features were somehow even more disconcerting for the pair of gunshot wounds through its faceplate. “What's this? I heard the Hydra here got burned out by those pompous Asgardians a few years back.”

“It's been four years, and they're still finding burrowed dens out in the wastelands.”

“Well, a trophy like that'll fetch a good price on the black market. Up for some hunting, maybe? Go all Ghost and the Darkness on some alien monsters?”

"Knock yourself out, Tony. Me, I've hunted enough Hydra for two lifetimes."

“I've got to admit, I missed the whole thing. I blame that blonde with the legs.”

Steve paused at that. “It lasted two years, Tony, and consumed dozens of worlds.”

“You'd understand if you'd have seen her.” Tony didn't even have the decency to look embarrassed. “What was it like, fighting the Hydra?”

“Remember all the scrapes we were in back in the day, all the narrow escapes? None of it compares to how terrible they are, Tony. You don't know what real fear is until you've got a thousand of those things barrelling down on you.”

Tony seemed to ponder that for a moment, give a noncommital gesture, and reach for a third photo only to realize there wasn't one.

"So, Tony. You're stalling. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Just a friendly business proposition.” He seemed to be getting his rhythm back. “Do you even know what the Uniteds are doing out here?"

"I'm guessing you're about to tell me."

Tony hopped up and sat on the front counter. The wood creaked ominously under his suit. "Digging up alien artifacts. Very particular ones, as it turns out. I won't bore you with all the technical details about collapsed singularities and cosmogony, but we're talking some real MacGuffin type stuff here; your boy Pierce has gone crazy for them. But I got a contact in the Mobius Foundation that'll pay top dollar for every artifact we, shall we say, ‘liberate’ from the Uniteds."

"I guess I can hardly pass that up, now can I?" Steve's face was as implacable as ever.

Tony squinted at him. "You know, I never can tell if you're being sarcastic. But sure, partners then. Sixty-forty."

"Seventy-thirty. My way. It's my men that'll be putting their lives on the line. And I need to be clear that I'm only doing this because if Pierce wants them so badly, then it's worth my time to stand in his way until I know more about them. If they become more trouble than they're worth, the deal's off."

"That's fair," Tony said as he hopped down to shake Steve's hand. "Always a pleasure doing business, Cap. Just like old times."

And it was true, they did have history together. Back before the Hydra War, before Pierce, they'd worked together, fought side by side. Nobody would ever have called them friends; something about Tony had always rubbed Steve the wrong way, and it was no secret the feeling had been mutual. But you didn't always have to like someone to work with them, and once you've each saved the other's life a couple times, it's hard to keep score after that.

Even with all that, tomething about the whole situation needled at the back of Steve's brain. If all Tony wanted was to hire some muscle, he could have got a better price with less baggage elsewhere. He wouldn't have come without an agenda of his own – something only Steve could do for him – but by the same merit there'd have been simpler ways for the wealthy and well-connected Tony Stark to sabotage his little rebellion. Whatever it was, Steve figured with cold detachment, he could deal with it if and when it came up. And if it wasn't going to end up with him in one of Pierce's holding cells waiting on interrogation and execution, he owed Tony enough to give him a chance.

"Old times", Steve echoed as he shook Tony's gauntletted hand. "Old times."

They looked at each other for a moment, the scars of the past on each of their faces.

Tony broke the gaze first. “So! You'll be glad to know I've already picked our next target.”

Steve's eyebrow went up. “Oh, really.”

“Hey, not my fault there's an expiry date on this one. Pierce's goons were digging up one of those artifacts I mentioned, about twenty clicks outside town. If my calculations are correct, and they always are, they should be getting ready to pull it out of the ground in about a two hours. We've got plenty of time to get your team some wheels, unless were you just planning on jogging there?”

Ignoring the jab, Steve strode out of the gym into the bright, dusty air of Backwater Station, his voice carrying easily over the thrum of activity even as his pace never slowed.

“All right boys, we're rolling out and we'll be coming back hot in T-minus 200. Izzy, Pinky, Happy, you're up. Pick five men each and be locked and ready to roll in eight. Dum Dum, with me.” The three other Howling Commandos were already off running as Dum Dum Dugan pulled along side his Captain. “Fix a hot evac with Sam. If all goes well, we can pull the bulk of United Forces strength after us as we leave; that'll give the locals a real shot at things here. But prep a fortified location up by that ravine to fall back to until he can pick us up. That's your job. We may not need it, but be ready to hold off anything short of Siege Tanks or Helicarriers until extraction. Layers, traps, anything to slow them down.”

“Don't you worry Cap, I'll be ready to show those liver-lips a good time.” Dugan nodded firmly and set about his task. Tony took his place, clearly enjoying the show.

Steve paused to regard him skeptically. “You've got something to say?” It didn't come out like a question.

“Sorry, no, yeah, I'm just wondering, after Izzy, Pinky, and Happy, when you're going to introduce me to the other four dwarves.” As Steve started to interject something, he held up his hands in a placating gesture. “No, no, it's cool. You're doing a, a bang-up job here; I've no intention of getting in your way. Just, y'know, tell me where you'll need me, White.”

Steve reluctantly decided to ignore the jab. By the time they were half way to the dig sight, he'd managed to forgive himself for passing it by.

\---------------------------------------

“What's the sitrep?”

Steve and the mobile squad were parked in a shallow depression a minute's walk from the dusty orange crater valley that contained the dig site. Izzy had volunteered to scout out ahead, and came back with a trio of Hellions hot on his tail. The fast attack vehicles were famous for the twin-mounted flamethrowers on the front, a loadout that made them terrifying against clustered infantry – or civilians for that matter, a thought that did more to make Steve wince than the jets of flame had. He'd trained his troops well though, and wide intervals denied the Hellions any juicy targets while Gauss rifle fire easily tore through the vehicle's defences.

Now Izzy sat on the cooling chassis of one of the Hellions as the rest crouched down in a loose circle. Only Steve remained standing, a subtle statement of status, of separation. There was a time when he'd have huddled tight with the rest. But there'd been too many betrayals, too much loss, and wounds that no passage of time could quite heal. Better to keep a little distance, physically and emotionally. So he stood, and Izzy sat and reported.

“Well Cap, the Hellions seemed to be the sum total of their mobile support. We've got a ring of paristeel bunkers around the crater rim. You can see the near one from here, but there's two more there and there,” Izzy said as he gestured to the left and right, “and two more on the opposite rim. They're something over 600 meters apart-”

Tony chimed in, “that's 741 meters. Point four. But let's not split hairs.” Izzy shot him an affronted glare.

Yet again, it wasn't worth the fight. Steve acknowledged, “either way, that's enough to cover any approach in a least one field of fire, but not enough to support each other from a direct attack. If we go straight at one, we can effectively ignore the others. Anything else?”

“Yeah, they've got a Siege Tank down there, right by the bottom of the valley. Fully deployed, of course.”

“Based on the depth of the valley, do you think the mortal can clear the rim?”

“Possible Cap, but I doubt it. Whatever impact blasted out this valley all those years ago must have hit pretty hard, there's a pretty steep decline in there.”

Steve nodded, “that makes sense.”

“Er, um, wait”, Tony chimed in, halfway through another bag of packaged peanuts. Lord knew where he kept pulling them out from. “Makes sense how? Nothing here synergizes. It's like they want us to waltz right in and deep six their hardware.”

Izzy and Steve looked back and forth with each other for a moment. This interloper wasn't going away just from being ignored. Steve begrudgingly broke it down for him. “The entire base here is built around population control. They've been abducting civilians and forcing them to work in the mine here. The siege tank and the bunkers are placed for keeping the civilians in, not keeping us out.”

“If they wanted to control the population, all they needed was a circular wall and a guy named Joey the Kneecap.”

“Nobody said they were smart, Tony.”

“Fair enough.” Tony popped the last of the peanuts into his mouth, chewed for a moment, then smirked. “Let's go teach them a lesson.”

 ---------------------------------------

The push against the bunker was simple enough. Pinky had brought a full medical wing with him, their nano-conveyed anesthetics, chemical modifiers, and attenuated surgical lasers able to stabilize nearly any non-lethal wound. From the limits of Gauss Rifle range, Steve and a dozen of his best poured fire into the bunker, while rotating out anyone hurt by the return fire. He'd expected to make three or four such rotations before cumulative damage destabilized the structure, but return fire was anemic at best, and only a young private by the name of Brendon Garritt had any scars to show for it: a Gauss round through the upper arm that the medic assured them would be patched up in moments with full mobility.

Brendon's eyes never left his Captain during the quick extraction of the bullet and application of anagel healing agent. Steve pretended not to notice, but stayed nearby until he was on his feet again.

Taking out a fully-deployed Siege Tank was more of a danger. Its side pontoons were firmly planted for stability, and the Arclite Siege Tank's shock cannon considerably outranged anything the Howling Commandos had on the ground. Steve was deeply aware of the risks delay would bring. He was moments from ordering an all-out charge when Tony shot forward, altitude jets firing, harrying the tank with repulsor blasts. It took Steve only a moment to realize that the Arclite's main cannon couldn't track something as fast-moving as Tony in his custom powerarmor suit, so while the tank futilely pock-marked the landscape with mortar blasts, Steve quietly darted up, rolled a grenade under, and ducked behind cover for the tank's inevitable end.

Scratch one instance of teaching the United Forces basic military doctrine.

From there, setting the conscripted civilian miners free to return to their families, and finishing the extraction of the artifact, took mere minutes. Steve couldn't help but feel uneasy in its presence – a nearly featureless prism that seemed to hum from within with unnatural energies. Tony assured him it emitted no ionizing radiation, implying it was safe to handle. Privately, Steve distrusted him, and it. He knew Tony wasn't one to lie outright, but also wasn't above doublespeak or lying by omission. If he said it didn't have ionizing radiation, well, it probably wouldn't give you cancer. But there were other ways relics of an ancient alien civilization could kill you.

Still, if Tony seemed to be comfortable trucking back to base camp with the unearthly thing next to him, how bad could it be? Steve's eyes flickered to the artifact, then back to Tony.

Having seen first-hand what Tony was comfortable with literally strapping to his body, it could be pretty darn bad indeed.

\---------------------------------------

 _...Princess Shuri announces new grant for archaeology museum..._  
_...Sources hint at new United Forces super weapon..._  
_...Howling Commandoes renew terrorist campaign..._  
_...United Planets terrazine freighter hijacked by pirates..._  
_...This is UPN news with Mitchell Ellison.._

"Thanks for staying with us. Let's go now to Karen Page with an update on Steve Rogers's violent uprising."  
"Thank you, Mitchell. Rogers is clearly widening his list of targets. He's attacked a United Planets archaeological dig, and possibly seized a dangerous alien artifact. Emperor Pierce spoke on this subject earlier today."  
An image of Alexander Pierce standing behind an array of microphones appeared on the screen. "There's no telling what kind of havoc these supposedly innocuous relics might wreak upon our worlds. Anyone found in possession of these items will be dealt with to the fullest extent of the law."  
"Shocking, Karen. I imagine civilian casualties were high as a result of Rogers's terrorist actions."  
"Actually, the only civilian deaths appear to be collateral damage from overzealous United Forc-"  
"Thanks, Karen! You heard it here first -- Steve Rogers, killing women and children on New Brooklyn."

\-----------------------------------

As they pulled back into base camp, Steve had to marvel once again at Dugan's sadistic creativity, not to mention his work ethic.

The spot itself was exceptional. With a sheer cliff face to their backs, the only approach was over one of two bridges, and Dugan had a pair of paristeel bunkers fortifying the end of each, with an SCV ready to patch up any damage. That'd hold the line nicely against anything the United Forces in the area could scramble for a quick response team, at least by land. Dugan, unlike the jokers who'd made the dig site, knew his doctrine and Steve trusted he'd have some sort of plan for dealing with aerial attack as well. But were those...?

“Hey Dugan, where'd you get the Longbolt turrets from?”

Dugan nodded at the implied complement. “I tagged them from the armoury at Backwater Station. Don't ask me why the Uniteds didn't have them set up somewhere, but I figured they'd come in use.”

“Remind me to give you a raise”, Steve grinned at his old friend.

“You don't pay us!”

Steve smiled, and moved on to the rest of the camp. “Remind me anyway”, he called over his shoulder.

Three steps later, every alarm in the camp went off simultaneously.

“HYDRA!” Junior came stumbling out of the command tent, one earpiece of his headset still clutched desperately against the side of his head and a look of consuming fear on his face. “We've got Hydra in our airspace!”

A growing wave of panic started sweeping through the camp, with voices raised in agitation and frantic motion in all quarters. Steve knew these men, many of them veterans of the Hydra War, could be exhorted to grit their teeth and face their dooms with grim determination, but the sheer impossibility of the news threatened to override their discipline. The Hydra had lain low for almost half a decade now, and the few remaining in human space were feral, uncoordinated, animalistic. The sight of thousands of spore pods raining down over an entire planet, infesting and destroying all in their path, had not been seen since the Winter Soldier had last led his forces in conquest.

The Winter Soldier.

Bucky.

Was he... back?

But his men needed him now. Steve shook his head. How far had his attention lapsed? Judging by how the panic had continued cascading, it had been longer than he felt comfortable admitting even to himself. But perhaps not too long.

Over the rising commotion, his voice carried loud and clear, projecting a calm he wasn't certain he felt himself. “All right, listen up everyone. Right now there are many questions and not enough answers, but that doesn't change the plan. We've prepared to hold this point against marines and Hellions, and instead we'll by holding it against Hydralings and Hydralisks. The Falcon is still coming, and will be here in twenty minutes. If we can focus and work together the way I've seen you all do before, we can hold the line against anything Hydra can throw at us.”

He looked out over his men. Most had turned to watch him, and the rest were joining too. “Some of you fought in the Hydra War, and were on the front lines for some of the darkest times our species has ever seen. Some of you have only heard about it in stories and nightmares. If you ask those who served, every single one will be able to tell you two things – that the Hydra are just as fearsome as you've been told, and that they can be beaten. We've done it before, and I intend to do it again.

“The enemy has changed, but your training and your orders have not. Whatever happens, trust that someone's got your back, because I'll be here to make sure that stays true. You've got your friends by your sides, a wall at your back, and heavy air support on its way. Twenty minutes, men. Take your positions.”

Even as Hydra spore pods darkened the sky, and the first retorts of gaussfire echoed through the ravine, Steve looked out across his men leaning to their assigned tasks with discipline and focus, and felt a surge of pride.

So Tony, of course, had to ruin the moment by clapping. “That was wonderful. Stirring, even. President Whitmore all over again. You nearly lost me in the middle there, but that stuff about teamwork at the end, that was gold star material.”

Steve turned on him, tension through his jawline. “You. It's your artifact bringing them here, isn't it?” Now that the thought had occurred to him, it was obvious. Not just the timing, but the skyline itself told the story, with the vast majority of Hydra spore pods dropping towards the general area of the dig site. And even as he watched, they were shifting further and further towards his base camp. His hands tightened into fists.

“Hey man, easy there. I swear I didn't know anything about the Hydra being involved.” Tony's voice was fraught with tension. Steve knew that hunted look in his eyes that meant he'd been caught off guard by this too. He relaxed slightly as Tony continued, “look, I need this fixed as much as anyone. Give me ten minutes and I'll fabricate a nanomolecular Faraday Cage, see if we can't screen out whatever emissions the Hydra are tracking.”

Forcing his hands to unclench, he replied, “okay, get working, but check in with me before you deploy it.”

The two old allies shared a look. Then each was off to their tasks as the Hydra assault began in earnest.

A dozen of the chitinous quadrupeds known as Hydralings were throwing themselves at the western bridge. Nearly as fast as a dune buggy and with savage claws that could pry open paristeel given time, no Hydra monstrosity haunted a man's dreams as much as a flood of 'Lings pouring over everything he'd once loved. Yet Gaussfire ripped through them easily enough, and Steve observed as the last one skidded to a lifeless stop forty meters from the bunker. No, forty five. Good.

Another swarm was approaching from the east though, a cluster of 'Lings moving slower than they should. As they reached the far side of the bridge, Steve spotted why – they were escorting three of the hulking Hydralisks. Quasi-serpentine bodies rearing twice as tall as a man and with vicious scythe arms, their real weapon was the dozens of bristle-like spines each one stored in their arching headplates. Even as the first rank of 'Lings fell to the punishing gaussfire his Howling Commandos were laying down from their bunkers, Steve saw the Hydralisks begin to return fire, propelling those spines well over a hundred meters to embed in the front of the bunker. Worse, the bodies of fallen 'Lings were clogging the lines of fire from the bunkers, while the arcing projectiles of the Hydralisks would continue to rain down with impunity. One of the Hydralisks had fallen in the opening barrage, but the other two were coiled down low and set to be a real problem.

He sprinted forward, bodily vaulting the entire bunker – mind the embrasure, nothing makes a bad day worse than friendly fire – and swatting aside a lucky 'Ling that had made it that far. Claws frantically scratched at his shield, and then the 'Ling was hissing in fury as the river swept it downstream. Following the extreme edge of the bridge where he wouldn't block his commandos' fire, he quickly reached a point where he could see around the bodies of the fallen 'Lings to put a trio of gauss rounds into the centre mass of the second Hydralisk. The third spun on him with a chittering growl, and he barely got his shield in front of him to deflect a barrage of urticating spines. Shield up, shoulders in, press forward – and he caught the last Hydralisk just under the faceplate, pressing it towards the opposite edge of the bridge. It reared, scythe-like claws ready to hook around the shield and into his sides and back, but this raised it high enough for supporting fire from the bunker to get a clear shot. Dozens of gauss round thudded into its massive faceplate, and the beast fell to rise no more.

When the sentry called the all-clear, Steve knew it was a temporary reprieve at best until greater numbers arrived, but began shoving the Hydra corpses off the bridge and into the raging river below, as the SCV replaced some damaged plating from the nearby bunkers. Hydralisk spines couldn't penetrate all the way through, but enough embedded themselves in the bunker's plating would eventually weaken the structural integrity, and could cause a collapse or give some lucky zerglings the leverage needed to really tear through that plating.

He looked up. That was a mistake. The Hydra spore pods were starting to fall closer and closer. Soon they'd have to deal with threats from inside the base itself.

A quick contact to the command tent was in order. With a finger to his ear, he called out, “Junior, how are we doing for time?”

“Seven more minutes, Captain. But I've got two new problems for you.” Junior's voice still quavered, but Steve noted with pride that he seemed to have himself back under control. A good kid, that one – or was when he volunteed. A good man now, Steve supposed.

“What's the first problem?”

“Mutalisks, in the skies to the north. They haven't approached yet, but we both know they'll get here before Sam will.”

Steve bore no love for the flying Hydra. Fast, agile creatures, occasionally described like dragonflies – if dragonflies were seven feet long, with bat-like wings twenty feet wide, and could fire highly corrosive projectiles out of their ovipositors. Not so much like dragonflies at all really, but still the backbone of any aerial Hydra force.

“I guess we'll find out if Dugan set those Longbolts up right, then. And the second problem?”

“There's a United force just around the bend in the river. I think they were the ones coming to get the artifact back.  And... wait a second, they're breaking comm silence... apparently they're pinned down by the Hydra and putting out a mayday, so I guess that problem solved itself?”

Steve shook his head. “Nobody deserves to be left for the Hydra, Junior. Ask bunkers Gamma and Delta to volunteer two commandos each to come forward rendezvous on my position, and make sure everyone knows to expect company when we get back.”

Junior wavered, “think you can get back before the next wave hits us?”

“I guess we'll find out, won't we.”

\--------------------------------------------------------------

Volunteers were never in short supply when Captain Rogers needed help, and within a minute four brave souls caught up with him near the corpse of the furthest fallen Hydraling body at the start of the eastern bridge, the first to die in the failed attack. Its broken claw was still oozing some viscous fluid, but the beast itself lay inert. They pushed on down the road following the river bank to find a few ruined Hellions, a crashed Medivac carrier, and seven United Forces marines holding a small rise against a pack of chittering Hydralings.

As Steve drew closer, he could see one of the UF men throw his Gauss rifle aside, its magazine clearly spent, to draw his sidearm in a desperate bid to delay the inevitable. Two more had bloody, damaged suits, but still put down another curtain of suppressing fire to keep the 'Lings back.

Steve marshalled his small force, and took them straight into the Hydra flank with a withering hail of gaussfire before them. Only one Hydraling got close enough to claw at his shield as he routed the pack before turning to the embattled UF force.

There was a moment of uncertainty there. Steve could hear the men behind him gripping their weapons a little bit tighter. Had Hydra not attacked, these UF marines would have been there to arrest or kill them. But all that melted when a marine with sergeant pips on his shoulder pauldoons stepped forward, popped open the faceplate of his armour, and greeted them with obvious relief. “Captain Steve Rogers. I never thought I'd say this to you, but am I glad to see you. I reckon you've got an exit strategy for this Charlie Foxtrot we've got goin' on here?”

Steve sized up the group. Standing by when people needed help was one thing, but bringing potential enemies aboard the Falcon was quite another. Still, leaving them here wouldn't be much better than a death sentence. “I do,” he hedged, “for friends.”

The sergeant laughed at that, and then seemed momentarily startled that he could still find something to laugh about. “Well, I can't speak for my men, but that United Forces banner was starting to chafe. I follow my orders but it don't necessarily mean I agree with all of them, and I wouldn't mind the chance to see if you give better ones. You'd be hard-pressed not to have grass that's greener, at any rate.” He pointed down, indicating the Hydra creep – a tumorous ground cover that seemed to inevitably spread from any centres of Hydra activity, corrupting anything that lingered in it unprotected. Tendrils of it were visibly snaking their way south, and would be at the base in minutes.

Well, that simplified the decision process. “Alright, you're in, as well as anyone else here who'd like to officially defect. We'll see you safe and off planet, and can look into permanent postings or return to a neutral port when possible.”

The chorus of assent and gratitude was instantaneous. There was no overt symbol of the change of loyalty, no insignia on the armour that could be symbolically ripped off, but the meaning was clear. As the eleven soldiers fell into line behind Steve for the hustle back, divisions between the ones he'd brought with him and the new allies were already blurring.

This is how rebellions grew.

Half way back, Tony buzzed in his ear. “Remember that mesh I talked about? Turns out it was easier to synthesize than I thought, I just had to slave the fab unit from an unused Marauder -”

Steve cut him short. “Good, now keep that ready but see if you can reinforce the men on the western bridge.”

Tony's no-doubt sarcastic reply was drowned out by a chorus of shouts. A fresh wave of Hydra attackers was surging towards the eastern bridge – and moving to cut them off.

The instinct to make a run for it was strong. But Hydralings could outrun any soldier, and they'd never make it behind the bunkers in time. That wasn't the only option though...

Steve held up his hand for the group to freeze, then motioned them down towards the banks of the rapids. The ground dropped off quickly south of the road, and there was space there by the natural levee where a force approaching from the north might miss them entirely.

Might.

They crouched there, for what seemed like an eternity, as the hollow sound of claw on concrete grew ever louder.

By his waist, he noticed the dead body of a lop, a rabbit-like creature but with two small, fuzzy antennae that was native to New Brooklyn. A Hydralisk spine had nearly bisected its tan midsection.

He looked at the brave volunteers around him, and the UF defectors who'd offered him their loyalty in exchange for protection.

The hollow sound grew louder, joined now by the more subtle hiss of the Hydralisk serpentine bodies slithering along the ground. And beneath that clamour, something else, a wet sound like the noise of a rotted apple being slowly crushed, but muffled as through a closed door, a sound that made no sense to Steve until the first tendrils of creep started emerging from the river bank.

He held his breath as the malevolent host clattered and slithered past, shaking the very sod he lay on. And then, after what felt like an eternity, the noise started to fade as the bulk of the Hydra passed.

He counted to five as the sound began to recede. Tension started seeping out of the men with him, and he could hear their breathing start to return to normal.

Four... five.... “CHARGE”, he bellowed, and all twelve, old friends and new allies alike, grabbed their Gauss rifles and surged back up past the bank and onto the road just as the first barrage of fire started resounding from the bunkers. The 'Lings were already halfway across the bridge by the time the first Hydralisk whirled to face them, a sensation of raw astonishment radiating from it, comprehensible across all barriers of species and biology. The hive mind of the Hydra meant the entire attack force was now aware too, but it wouldn't matter. Twelve Gauss rifles opened fire at the unguarded Hydralisks, a wall of fire that could strip through solid rock, and each one fell in rapid succession. Trapped between the paristeel bunker and Steve's force, the remaining 'Lings fought viciously until the end.

When the last hooked claw stopped twitching, a cheer went up from the bunkers that Steve's newly-expanded squad was quick to echo back.

\------------------------------------------------------------

The fight wasn't over though. That was the terror of the Hydra – kill one, and two more take its place. The next attack would be larger, and the one after that, wave after ever-escalating wave until they were drowned in it, then outward to assimilate the entire world as had happened to so many in the first war...

He shook his head. Time to take stock.

Repair work was coming along on the eastern bunkers; thanks to the pincer counterattack on the Hydra force, damage had been light.

Tony, meanwhile, was showboating by the western bridge. That man was insufferable, but at least the bridge held.

The turrets had functioned reasonably well. Even as he watched, a cluster of Mutalisks swooped in with a probing attack, only for Longbolt missiles to thunder back in reply. One of the turrets was already irreparably damaged from the acidic projectiles of the Mutalisks, but the remaining turrets were holding the Hydra air forces off for the time being.

An itching suspicion hit him. He checked the missile supply. Only a few shots left then. Better hope the Hydra didn't realize that, but they'd break through sooner rather than later either way.

Sooner... or now. The mid-day sky, already corrupted by the Hydra assault on the planet, darkened even further as the endless rain of spore pods now firmly eclipsed the sun. The few remaining Longbolts could not stem that tide, nor the panicked gaussfire of his men as they shot down five, ten, twenty of the pods before they reached surface. Dozens more pods still fell, some splattering wetly across concrete, some putting roots in the dirt for new patches of creep to spread, and some releasing Hydralings directly into the middle of their base.

Steve dove forward, flinging his shield to ricochet off one 'Ling and catch a second before it could tear into the command tent “Take your time Sam, no rush”, he called into his earpiece while recovering his shield just in time to catch the leap of a third 'Ling, flinging it bodily aside as two more raced towards him. He caught the mandible of the fourth inches from his face and spun it into the path of the fifth, twisting until the mandible broke off and stabbing it into the neck of the... sixth, or had the third... and now a seventh, eighth...

The clouds broke, and raw sunlight shone through as a halo around Sam Wilson's Behemoth-class helicarrier. Twenty turbolaz emplacements blazed to life as its custom targetting blades picked off Hydra spore pods with pinpoint accuracy and devastated another swarmed attack on the western bridge. The Hydra would regroup and push back forward, but they had a few minutes of relative safety.

Sam's voice crackled through the earpiece. “Cavalry's arrived! Anyone still alive down there?”

“Good to see you too, Sam. Welcome to the party.” Steve couldn't help but grin.

“Glad we made it in time, Captain. Now let's get you boys out of there.”

\---------------------------------------------------------------

The evac was rapid and thorough. With The Falcon to hold off all but the most coordinated Hydra assault, Medivacs could pull half a dozen men off the surface, get them loaded into the helicarrier, and return for the next squad in just over a minute.

Ever-increasing swarms of Mutalisks harried the Falcon as Steve and Tony took the bridge. Tony whistled appreciatively at the stately accommodations and advanced tactical interfaces. “I've got to say, Steve, you've been holding out on me. If I knew you were living like this, I'd have signed up years ago!”

Steve glanced at him, unsure if he was being mocked, and simply advanced to talk to his second in command. Sam's uniform, as usual, was impeccable. Loyalty and discipline radiated off of him, and Steve had to smile. “You were cutting it pretty close there, Sam.”

“Never left you hanging before, Captain.”

“Fair enough. Now get us out of here, but don't engage warp yet. We need to lead the Hydra away from the planet.”

Sam Wilson stepped forward to the command console, his voice firm and commanding. “All batteries concentrate forward firepower. Spin up drives two and six. Pitch to sixty and ahead full throttle... mark!” Artifical gravity kept them on their feet as the massive helicarrier angled itself away from the planet and began accelerating. The harrying Mutalisks and cloud of Hydra spore pods followed after, large enough to darken a continent. Steve's face grew grim just looking at it – only a small fraction of them had made planetfall, but the colonists there were still in for a tough time against the forces remaining on the ground. The entire planet would have been doomed if even half these spore pods had made dirtside. But the plan was working. The ominous cloud was following the Falcon, now out past the asteroid belt, and the colonists would at least have a fighting chance.

Nobody had yet properly determined how the Hydra flew through space. Mutalisks still flapped and swooped like they were in atmosphere, though there was nothing for the wings to push on. “Solar sails”, some said, in complete ignorance of the scales involved. “Methane expulsions” said others, with equal ignorance of biological constraints and conservation of mass. “Magic” said still others, or at least whatever form of psionic energy empowered their hive mind and could, in theory, be turned to other purposes.

Steve supposed it didn't matter. The Falcon was travelling a measurable fraction of the speed of light through a vacuum, and the Hydra cloud was riding their contrail out into interstellar space. Without their gravimetric wake, the Hydra could still return to New Brooklyn in time, but reversing their momentum would take considerable effort and they'd have a far easier time coasting back out to Char or wherever this armada had come from.

Sam seemed to sense it, too. “All hands brace for warp jump on my mark!”

Tony grimaced, muttered something about always hating this part, and the heavy gauntlet of his suit closed around a nearby handhold.

Sam watched his display carefully, counting down the seconds until they passed the Heliosheath.

“Mark!”

Reality stretched, and snapped. Tony's eyes flew wide and his breath caught in his throat as some secret panic held him in its clutches.

But the warp only lasted a moment, subjectively, and then they were floating serenely in interstellar space, lightyears from any planet or enemy. Space was incomprehensibly big and almost invariably empty. All you had to do for total privacy was choose a spot at random and park in it. No enemies would trouble them here. Sam checked his displays, nodding with satisfaction at whatever he saw, and turned back to his Captain.

Steve had one burning question. “So. What happened? We haven't seen the Hydra in half a decade, and that artifact's been there the whole time. Why attack New Brooklyn now?” He managed not to glance back at Tony.

Sam's face took on a new tension. “It's not just New Brooklyn, Captain. Here, you need to see this”, he said as he tapped a nearby console to pull up the news feed. With Ansible technology, the news was still current even out here.

 _...Hydra swarm launched a full scale attack..._  
_...Devastation spread throughout all outer rim planets..._  
_...Sustained heavy losses..._  
_...Casualties in the billions.._  
_...Minutes ago the Hydra attacked a Dominion military research fac-..._

Tony whispered “Sweet mother of mercy” as more than one feed cut off to the sounds of explosions.

Karen Page was on screen now, looking rather more harried than usual. “New, exclusive video footage confirms the Winter Soldier is in fact leading the swarm!”

From the display, captured mid-step against a backdrop of the Hydra running rampant through a major city, soulless eyes turned to lock onto the camera and insectile left arm half-raised to destroy it – there was no denying it.

Steve felt his breath catch in his throat. “He's back to finish the job....”


	2. Where is Your Home (Make Sure)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Bruce solves problems by not quite having a nervous breakdown.
> 
> (SC2 Missions: The Evacuation, Smash and Grab)

“To any ship receiving this transmission, Hydra are invading Agria. The United Forces have abandoned us here. We're just a small farming colony. We've got to evacuate before we're overrun. If you can hear this message, please help us!”

Bruce Banner wiped perspiration from his brow as he keyed the broadcast for perpetual loop-and-retrans. Some part of his mind kept churning over ways to boost the signal and attenuate the frequency to attract more attention, but even running a new cat12 cable to the ansible would take too much time from other, more pressing concerns. He didn't even have time to play back the message to see if he'd kept the edge of bubbling hysteria out of his voice.

His fingers flew across keyboards. A globe appeared, with a rapidly spreading rash of red indicating Hydra activity, centered thus far on the night-side of the planet. Query local time – 13am, just shy of mid-day. Query location Agrian defence force – exiting the system at max speed. Query regional command stations still in communications – just his. Query location of local command – he didn't even need the computer for that one; Ross had opted for the easy way out and now lay crumpled in a corner, gun still dangling from his dead hands. Everyone else had fled to their loved ones.

Query present known head of chain of command – a picture of Banner, taken from his student days in the core worlds, back when his eyes still shone with optimism.

“No, no, no, no, no!” His fist sent a small crack through the console display, and the sudden noise made him flinch and realize he was hyperventilating. Okay, okay, slow down for a second and process...

Order of growth would be... what, naively exponential, but more likely a Fibonacci polynomial since infested biomass is not immediately deadly. That'd only apply within a metropolis though, and expansion between cities would be linear between a pair of cities but quadradic in terms of geographic area.... given a Hydraling ground speed of about 60 kmph, depending on strain...

No no no no no. Hyperventilating again, wrong problem.  Exhale and refocus. Not “when are we all dead”, ask “how to maximize survival”. Final written defence, due in two minutes, or all grants are withdrawn.

Three orders of business: mobilize the spaceport. Evacuate everyone possible to near the spaceport. Defend evacuation paths from any stray Hydra ahead of the main force.

On second thought, reverse One and Two; the evacuation's going to take longer.

No solutions present for Three. No viable resources or firepower with the Uniteds cutting and running.

Okay, okay, breathing under control. Worry about One and Two first. Maybe someone will get the SOS. Yeah, and maybe the Uniteds who swore to defend this colony would regrow their conscience. Or all simultaneously have aneurysms, yeah that sounds good...

And maybe the Asgardians would arrive, to burn this planet to the mantle just like they did in the first war. There's more than one way to die.

Spots were encroaching on his vision now. Cold sweat on his brow. There IS more than one way to die, and hesitating is one of the stupidest. Do what you can, worry about the rest later.

Wait, how long since the news broke? He glanced at the chrono. Just under three minutes. Felt like two lifetimes. No official report, so the only people who know the truth here are the ones from the command center, who should be clearing the parking lot just about now. No other ansibles on the subcontinent. All anyone else would see is just static on official frequences, not unusual given some of the storms around here. No widespread panic yet then. Still time to keep this under control.

His trembling fingers dialed the number from memory as he patched himself into the regional emergency alert net. “Uh, hi everybody, this is Bruce, we've got a bit of a situation here...”

\---------------------------------------------------------

“Well,” Bruce muttered to himself, as he watched the first Howling Commando dropship make its final landing in response to his SOS, “that's it. I'm never going to try to predict anything again.” Some small voice in the back of his head started predicting how long that commitment would last, failed to be immediately overruled, and concluded its job here was done.

The dropship doors hissed open, and a squad of soldiers in various power armor began falling out into a defensive perimeter, followed by none other than the legendary outlaw, most wanted man in the entire sector five years running, Captain Steven Grant Rogers himself.

Steve Rogers was walking on Agrian soil.

Steve Rogers was walking over to Bruce.

To talk to him.

A sizeable portion of Bruce's mind instantly dedicated itself to simulating different possible outcomes here, and had settled on the most likely being somewhere between “gimme all your money and I might save two of you” and “hi, I'm just here to enjoy watching the Hydra eat your face in person”.

Instead, the wanted terrorist gave a deferential nod, stuck out his hand for a shake, and said “you must be Dr. Banner. I'm Steve; it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Bruce could feel his brain shutting down in protest. “Uh.... hi. I'm Bruce. You must be.... uh,” oh right he said that already I'm repeating him what do I do what do I do, “Steve. Right. This is... this is Agria. Or what's left of it I guess.”

Steve cocked an understanding grin at him, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. “You've had a long day, haven't you Bruce? Agria too. It looks to be a charming place, though I suppose I'm not seeing it at its best. What can my men and I do to help?”

“Help? Oh, right. So um we've got some old T-17s we can boost out to low orbit but not much farther, and the evacuation is going... honestly, better than simulation, which is surprising, but it's still not going to finish before Hydra gets here. If you can keep this road open when we shuttle folks to the starport, and give us a boost from orbit, that should get us out of the immediate crisis. With any luck we can start solving our own problems from there.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Speaking into his earpiece, Steve hustled off to tend to whatever his soldiers were doing, while Bruce felt his mental gears gradually re-align. The legendary outlaw seemed sincere in his desire to help. Wasn't he a pitiless mass murderer though? But... where had he heard that, on UPN? And it was common knowledge even in the core that Emperor Pierce had them under his thumb.

Suddenly a fair number of things started making more sense. And a fair number of other assumptions would need to be challenged and reconsidered later. Bruce put that on his mental to-do list, behind “not dying in the next 48 hours” but ahead of “curling up in a duvet and sleeping for a week”.

First things first, right?

\--------------------------------------------

His chrono insisted it had only been 53 minutes. Bruce weighed the odds that his chrono was busted over the possibility that they'd finished the evacuation that quickly, and decided he didn't even care. With 98% of the regional population locked and loaded, they'd rescued more people that they had any right to. Every single person who'd made the rendezvous point was in orbit or headed that way, including Bruce himself.

He looked out the window, and tried to enjoy the view. It was, objectively, beautiful – a pale blue orb, clouds swirling in the same fern-like formations that dominated its native biosphere, just in the midst of finding its carbon cycle balance with the help of his terraforming team. Some of their work would carry on without them, if Hydra left it reasonably intact. They sometimes did, leaving a system en masse as if pulled on some puppetmaster's strings. Other times they were the archetypal aggressively invasive species. Both modes were fascinating from a zoological perspective.

He found he was crying.

Bruce looked out the viewport over the receding blue orb he'd help shape and tried not to cry.

A minute later he settled for trying to cry softly enough that he wouldn't disturb the other passengers.

And then the were docking. A ruddy-skinned attendant in a beret, presumably directing traffic, waved Bruce through to a lift. Behind him he heard something about cafeteria access, water rationing, and having to sleep in the shuttles, but for some reason he couldn't bring himself to focus on it.

Deep breaths. Hold, count to five. Release.  The lift rose, and he found his head clearing slightly with it. He tried to replay what the attendant had said, gave up, and decided he'd sort it out whenever the lift stopped moving. With all the new arrivals, he's hardly going to be the only person separated and looking for directions.

The lift opened onto what was clearly the bridge of the ship. Captain Steve Rogers was standing at a holotable with a man in an advanced power armor suit and another with a buzz cut and pristine military uniform. All three turned to stare at Bruce.

Oh god. This was like his high school nightmares, except instead of being naked, he still had flecks of General Ross's blood on his sleeve. On second thought, this was worse.

“I... uh..... I seem to have made a wrong turn.” Ohgodohgodohgod....

“Glad you could make it, Doctor Banner,” called Steve, beckoning him over to the table. “Banner, I'd like you to meet my second in command and most trusted adviser, Sam Wilson. And this fellow is Tony Stark.”

Wilson nodded to him, with a perfectly civil “pleased to make the acquaintance.”

Tony, meanwhile, just looked over at Steve incredulously. “Why are we inviting this guy up here? Just because he was local admin at some dirt-scratching Podunk?”

“Yes, I really should...”

But Steve wasn't having any of it. “We're 'inviting him over' because he's got advanced qualifications in xenobiology, radiobiology, and medicine, among other things. And he can make good choices under pressure.”

“I really don't think...”

Now Tony's eyes were intent on him, as if seeing him for the first time. With an affected air of skepticism and short, clipped syllables he blurted, “quick, what's the halflife of Polonium-209?”

That was an easy one, a nice round number as long as you didn't get it confused with the far more notable Polonium-210. “Just over a century, but what does...”

“He's in,” Tony nodded as he headed back to the table and turned to face Steve again. “But don't think this gets you off the hook for explaining what the flipping flapjacks is going on here.”

He'd clearly walked in on some sort of argument in progress, but Bruce couldn't see a way to politely extract himself so he sidled up to the table in the empty spot across from Sam. “So... what's this about?”

Tony jumped on the invitation. “So I'm up here on the bridge with these two sticks in the mud, when all the news is breaking on the Hydra attacks. And it's some pretty heavy stuff, worlds falling, Hydra everywhere, the First War all over again, stuff that everyone and their cousin Bob has had nightmares about, but you can see these two chums just calculating logistics and tactical arrangements in their heads the whole time. Then the Winter Soldier gets spotted – because that's a surprise, Hydra's most dangerous weapon on the field on their big day – and this jock,” Tony gestured over at Steve, who clenches his jaw “gets all weepy-eyed and cold-sweating, and THIS cheerleader,” a gesture at Sam this time, met with an exasperated sigh, “tries to play it off like nothing happened. And now the two are talking like it's their jobs to end this war, while I'm just trying not to go out like John Hurt in the first Alien movie.”

“Uh....”

Sam grimaced at Tony. “I was going to wait until our new associate had some time to adjust, but if you're intent on forcing the issue, then I suppose there's nothing for it.” Sam turned to Bruce, his voice and expression softening and his perfect posture easing slightly. “My apologies, Dr. Banner,” he said, gently. “If you'd like to get a few hours of sleep and join us later, you're more than welcome to.”

“Thanks, but I just don't... I mean, I'm just a researcher with a paper rank on a colony world that doesn't really exist any more. What's that to a legendary outlaw company, no offence intended?”

Sam's fingers were busy on the console, pulling up some holofile or other, but his eyes were on Bruce. “We may be outlaws, but as you're about to see, we're waist deep in this mess and about to get a lot deeper, and to be frank we could use an actual scientist – don't give me that look, Tony, I'm told you're a brilliant engineer, but that's not the same thing. Anyway Bruce, you're a face the other colonists know to listen to. Don't sell yourself short. And....”, he tapped out one last command on the console, “we're ready.”

A holo of the Winter Soldier came up. Unkempt hair, eyes empty and cold as the void between stars, black mask obscuring the lower half of the face, and the signature gleaming chitin completely replacing his left arm. Bruce found himself taking a step back without ever intending to. Even in holo, the emanation of threat was palpable.

Tony stepped around the table for a better view, resting a gauntleted hand lightely on his shoulder. Bruce found the gesture strangely centering, and his heartrate began stabilizing.

Captain Rogers seemed completely engrossed with the main viewport, face unreadable as ever.

With a quick nod, Sam continued. “May I present the Winter Soldier. He didn't start Hydra, but after the destruction of the Zola hivemind he's been the de-facto leader of the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. Everyone knows he was once human before Hydra infested his mind and body. But what the newsreels leave out....”

Sam pressed a button. The image shifted to a pair of men, soldiers, side by side, eyes on each other, military posture but the fingers on their adjoining hands tenderly curled together. Bruce heard Tony's breath catch in his throat, and studied the image again. He felt Sam's eyes on him as if expecting a reaction, but just felt confused. “What... what am I looking at? The outfits look like Pierce's old revolutionaries, S.H.I.E.L.D. or something like that, but....” He caught Tony's eye. “What am I looking at?”

For once, Tony's voice was hushed and reverent. “That man on the left, that's our good friend Steve over there, in his younger days. And the man on the right, if I'm not mistaken and I never am, is the one who became the Winter Soldier.”

Bruce blinked. Sam waited. Steve’s eyes drilled holes in the forward viewport. Tony's lip twitched as he watched the cogs turning.

“But... wait,  _WHAT_!?”

\----------------------------------------

After far too little sleep, and several hours on the ansible with representatives of other refugee populations hashing out plans for a relocation staging area on Meinhoff, mess was apparently at 0800 shipboard time. Bruce tried to calculate his precise degree of jetlag in his head, but couldn't make the numbers fit. Nothing at all seemed to fit. Nothing made sense. Eventually he concluded his degree of jetlag was “lots”, that it would be improved by food in his belly, and that nothing else would benefit from his attention at the moment now that a short-term destination for his fellow Agrians had been arranged.

The cantina was bustling. Between the Falcon's crew and his fellow Agrians, lines were wrapped from the service counter, around the jukebox, under the mezzanine, and partially into the hall. People were grumbling around them, but Bruce didn't mind the wait. Queueing, at least, was sensible. Food was sensible. Life went on.

Fortunately, seating at least was plentiful. The occasional sidelong glance or awkward stare from the other Agrians bothered Bruce less than the idea of finding another place to eat, so he settled into an empty table.

He was halfway through his eggs when he heard a hush in the room as Steve Rogers walked in. His men saluted, he waved them off, and everyone resumed what they'd been doing before except Bruce who found Captain Rogers stepping up to his table.

“Is this seat taken?” The voice was strong, but not insistent, not commanding.

Bruce blinked for a moment. “Oh, uh, sure. I mean, no it isn't.”

“Thanks.” Steve sat, and looked around the room.

Bruce ate.

Steve sat.

Eventually, Steve broke the silence first. “You have questions about last night”, he stated.

Bruce put down his fork. Looking up and meeting Steve's gaze solidly for the first time, he answered “yeah... but you clearly aren't comfortable talking about it.”

“As much as it pains me to say it, Tony was right. It's going to be relevant in the coming weeks. None of this is exactly secret, and my comfort is less important than our success. And our survival.”

Steve paused. Bruce waited. Steve continued, “the truth is, while I've known Tony for over a decade, I can't trust him. And Sam lacks objectivity where I'm concerned. Just as I lack objectivity where Bu... the Winter Soldier is concerned. I need someone on the inner circle who knows what's going on but doesn't have the same baggage.”

The Odd-Man Hypothesis. Bruce hadn't considered that. He knew his scientific qualifications didn't truly justify the invitation to the Falcon's bridge crew, and Sam's line about the colonists trusting him was flimsy at best – there's other faces that could be used equally well. But... he had no living family, no significant others, no close friends that made it off Agria. While lacking any formal standing, the Odd-Man Hypothesis was a bit of pop psychology predicting that unattached individuals like himself could be the most objective in high-stakes decision-making. In practice, unattached individuals can often have significantly higher Neurotic Quotient than the general population, and that emotional instability can counterbalance any benefit to objectivity. Yet it was still true that experimental double-blinds are used for quite valid reasons, and a degree of separation can create a valuable perspective in tense situations.

And... he did do a good job on Agria, didn't he? That didn't guarantee he'd be the person Steve Rogers was looking for, but for the first time, the invitation was making sense to him.

“Okay. I'm in. But... let's start at the beginning. How did you meet him?”

Captain Rogers was a reluctant narrator, but a thorough one. When humanity had first learned they were not the only spacefairing races, through the first Hydra infestation in New Bronx, and the subsequent annihilation brought by the Asgardians intent on scouring all life on that rock, it had been in Steve's proverbial backyard. He'd been a marshall on New Brooklyn, and still bore the shield that had been his badge of office there. The Confederacy of Worlds abandoned New Brooklyn as a lost cause rather than “wasting” valuable military hardware. But Alexander Pierce's rebellion was there for them, evacuating the colony and recruiting any colonists who wanted to fight for a better tomorrow.

The parallels with the Howling Commandoes and Agria did not escape Bruce, and the look in Steve's eyes confirmed he recognized it too. Was this a cautionary tale?

In any case, on their first date, Steve and Bucky liberated a planet.

It wasn't exactly what either of them had in mind. The "date", that is. A down-to-earth marshall from New Brooklyn had little in common with the revolution's deadliest sniper, but James Buchanan Barnes, “Bucky” for short, was the only one General Pierce could trust to take out the oppressive Confederate leadership, and Steve's strong moral code and inspirational ability had brought him from a small-town marshall on a now-blasted world all the way to a command position in the front lines of the action. So when Pierce needed a strike force to escort Bucky to the Dominion capital, Steve was the man for the job.

The mission was a smashing success. Steve and Bucky proved unstoppable, and with the Confederate leadership removed the planet's population eagerly embraced the rebellion's cause. Rarely is a coup welcomed so vigorously, but the callous corruption of the Confederacy had earned more than their fair share of enemies, and then-recent events with Hydra on New Bronx had turned a simmering discontent into a boiling hatred.

Bruce was surprised to learn that a fair number of the Howling Commandos dated from this era. Steve talked with obvious affection about “Dum Dum” Dugan, Morita, Pinkerton, Juniper, and the others. He talked about liberating worlds and singing in the canteen, of consoling Dernier though a breakup and of discovering the custom posters the others had made of him posing heroically with a sun behind him forming the impression of a halo.  

But it was here that Steve's voice got tense. On one of Steve and Bucky's raids on a Confederate laboratory, they'd learned a dark secret – that the Confederacy had discovered a method of drawing and corralling wild Hydra. Their hive mind functioned on a harmonic frequency of that of the rare human psychics, and while the records they found bore no suggestion of actual communication between humans and Hydra, it had been firmly established that wild Hydra free from the hive mind's control flock to these psychic emanations like locusts to a flame. They'd even developed and implemented a method of broadcasting these emanations across the void between stars.

The military implications were obvious, and horrifying. The Confederacy must be destroyed. Pierce had sworn never to sink to the Confederate's level, but when the opportunity arose to use the Confederate's own psi-emitter against them on the capital planet of Tarsonis, he'd sent Bucky to do the deed. And whatever Bucky's own feelings on the matter had been, Steve knew he'd always complete his missions or die trying.

Bruce could hear the heartbreak in Steve's voice as he spoke about learning of the mission only when Bucky was already on the surface, of begging Pierce to extract him early only to learn that no extraction was ever planned at all, and of hijacking a shuttle with some of his closest friends – all of whom insisted on coming despite Steve ordering them to stay – and of watching in horror as Hydra overran the planet before he even reached upper atmosphere.

Steve fell silent.

Bruce waited, the remains of his breakfast entirely forgotten.  A few nearby tables had gone still as well, and more than one was making no attempt to hide that they were listening in.

After a pregnant silence, Steve's voice was flat as he relayed the events leading up to the First Battle of Char. They'd always known Bucky had some latent psychic ability, an incredibly rare gift that only seemed to manifest for him in an uncanny ability to make shots that shouldn't be possible. Against inanimate targets he was good, no doubt about it, but with a living person in his sights he could take them out through closed curtains, drywall, even once through a pouring waterfall. He could sense their position, their motion, without needing to rely on his eyes, and that talent had been honed by the elite Ghost program. But that was it, only awareness and only for a single person he already knew the general position of. Until a month after he was taken, when his mind reached across the great abyss of interstellar space to contact Steve with a plea for help, and a location - the volcanic deathworld of Char.

One of the eavesdroppers couldn't contain themselves.  "Char? You're talking about Char? Oh man, I still wake up screaming from the nightmares I have about that pit.  A thick layer of ash covers everything, and there's this eerie red glow that comes from the magma that seeps up through the surface of the planet.  One wrong step and you find yourself wading in a pool of hot lava.  You ever hear the scream of a man as he is being burned alive by lava?  It's not something you soon forget, let me tell you.  And if the infernal planet doesn't get you, there's always the damned Hydra that'll try and finish the job. Those devils were everywhere, and they killed a whole lot of my buddies in ways I don't want to remember. Char was a hellhole, alright, and I'd rather eat a gauss round in the privacy of my cabin that go back there... on anyone's orders but the Cap's, at least."

 Steve's eyes pinched with regret.  "Thank you for that trust, Morita, but it'll be a dark day I ever have to ask that of anyone twice."

"It was Bucky.  We understood."  And that seemed to settle it.

In any case, the attack on Char would have been a suicide mission had they not received help from an unlikely source - Thor and the Warriors Three, Asgard's finest fighters, appeared out of an iridescent warp gate of some kind and slammed into the main Hydra cluster like the fist of an angry god, which apparently wasn't far off from the truth of it in an age when the ancient Norse Pantheon walked the stars openly once more. 

Yet despite making solid inroads, they were too late.  The entity once known as James Buchanan Barnes emerged from its chrysalis as the Winter Soldier, fully under Zola's control.

Bruce raised his hand.  "Sorry to interrupt," he hesitated, "but who's Zola?"

"That was the name Bu... the Winter Soldier gave for the hive mind.  We learned a lot about Hydra that day, and more about Asgard.  And with Asgard by our side, we were, eventually, able to destroy Zola.  In a better world, that would have freed Bucky just as it reverted the rest of the Hydra from a cohesive force to a collection of animalistic pockets.  Sadly..."

"Wait, this part I know," Bruce interrupted.  "Whatever neural re-programming they had in him must have carried through Hydra's destruction, right?  And with his psychic talent intact, that must be what allowed him to gather up the feral Hydra back into an army.  That would explain the odd lull in Hydra activity, before the second phase of the war.  I was studying on Korhol at the time, and the way everyone was talking there was no use for environmental sciences any more since the last core system was projected to fall before I'd have time to graduate.  As if prepping a thesis defence wasn't stressful enough already, am I right?" He chuckled, looked around at the grim and battle-scarred faces around him, and immediately regretted his moment of levity.  "Er... right.  I guess you guys were out there holding the line with the United Forces, huh?  So... how did you guys do it?  How did you end the first war?"

Morita met him straight in the eye.  "We didn't.  The Winter Soldier destroyed a dozen worlds, and then just..."  He finished with an extravagant poofing gesture and then sat back in his chair as if that's all there was to say about that.

"Hydra pulled back to the rimward worlds around Char and stayed there.  And the next day, we were back to being wanted criminals", Steve continued, his eyes cold and hard again.  "Pierce needs to pay for his crimes and I intend to see that happen.  And meanwhile we'll do what we can for people on worlds like Agria.  Whatever games Pierce has been playing with people's lives, humanity's survival comes first.  But taking Pierce down a peg is a close second.  The way I see it, our future isn't secure unless there's leaders who care more about doing the right thing than catering to their own ego."

Someone across the room was cranking the volume on the canteen tv as the news came on.

 _...Meinhoff refugee crisis brings health concerns..._  
_...Emperor declares new austerity measures..._  
_...General Rhodes begins 'Operation Burnout' to clear York system..._  
_...This is UNN with Mitchell Ellison...._

"Mitchell Ellison, UNN. We've got Karen Page on remote feed from Miranda, a fringe colony under attack by Hydra. Are you there Karen? Okay, we seem to be having a sound problem with -- I'm being told Emperor Pierce is going to address us directly? Let's take you to his announcement, already in progress."

There was a cut to Pierce's face, smug as ever, as the newsfeed caught him mid-sentence, "...finest military minds are being brought to bear, and it's my pleasure to announce that they'll soon be led by the hero of Torus himself, General James Rhodes. With General Rhodes at the helm and our finely honed United Forces military under his command, I have every confidence that this new Hydra threat will be contained very soon." 

A cut back to Ellison.  "There you have it, viewers. With Rhodes in command, the Hydra swarm will be defeated in no time. Up next: Rogers ups his campaign of terror -- just as Hydra reappears. Coincidence? You decide after these messages."

The tv went to commercial, and the volume went back down. 

Morita couldn't contain his surprise.  "Rhodes?  I thought he retired years ago."

"He did," Steve confirmed.  "But I'm not surprised he'd accept re-enlistment now.  He's a good soldier, and the Hydra offensive needs to be stopped."

Bruce furrowed his brow.  "Isn't the United Forces your enemy though?  Wouldn't he shoot us down if he had the chance?"

"He would, which is why I intend not to give him that chance.  But I knew him during the First War, and I've seen him put his life on the line to save civilians.  When it comes to holding the line against the Swarm, I'd rather have the core worlds protected by a competent enemy than an incompetent friend."

Morita scowled, "Way I see it, anyone who'd serve under Pierce is trash." 

Steve hesitated.  "Maybe.  But I like to believe the best in people.  If he does believe in everything Pierce has been doing, then yeah, he's trash.  But that may not be the case."

"You mean, like, you think maybe that's why he retired," Bruce interjected.

"It's possible.  Or Pierce managed to hide the truth from him, like he did from me for a while.  There's no place for hesitation in the fight against tyranny, and force - even lethal force - is often necessary.  But the people standing across from us are humans too, who can be lied to or manipulated, and I guarantee there's more to each of them than what can be seen at a glance.  That can't ever stop us, but we can still hope for the best in them."

\---------------------------

Bruce spent most of the next ten hours on the ansible, its proverbial 'spooky action at a distance' allowing him to follow the various discussions between Meinhoff administration and representatives of the various other refugee groups.  Meinhoff had a healthy agricultural surplus and sufficient open land to house the several million refugees, at least until more permanent arrangements could be made.  The Falcon could boost them into the system well outside of identification range, and their T-17 bulk freighters could easily fly them in from there.  His proposal to the rest of the bridge crew was met with reservations from Sam about guaranteeing the Falcon's safety, but Steve gave the go-ahead anyway and that was the end of it.  Once Steve made a decision, Sam's only concern was to find the best way to make it work. 

And work it did.  Notorious outlaws don't generally file flight plans, so there was a fair amount of astrogation, but the result was simple enough - an announcement on the PA, a tally of passengers on the various T-17s (most were already asleep or otherwise occupying themselves in their assigned berths), a few translocations later, and the freighters were cruising to join the hodgepodge of other vessels around Meinhoff's central hub along with anyone who hadn't volunteered to stay and going the Howling Commandos.  There was some discussion about where to head next, a few different short term contracts they were considering to drum up some extra resources.  Bruce left them to it; his part was done for now.

His cabin (or rather, he thought, the cabin currently assigned to him) wasn't far, and the bed was comfortable, but for some reason he couldn't sleep. 

He closed his eyes and forced them to drift.

He counted sheep. 

He recited primes, perfect squares, and Fibonacci numbers.

After about an hour, he decided sleep wasn't going to happen, and headed down to the lab.  Not for the first time, he was grateful for the elegant intraship transportation; the Falcon must have been top of the line out of the docks.  He stepped into the lift, pressed the button marked with the symbol of an old-fashioned beaker, and enjoyed a smooth ride down.

Like many things on the ship, the lab had obviously been well-appointed originally, but heavily jury-rigged from there.  Some containment chambers and advanced sensory apparatuses lined the wall, some sort of weathered stone polyhedron surrounded by nanomolecular mesh for no readily apparent reason, but the focus of the room had obviously been shifted to a massive mainframe with a single terminal outlet currently occupied by a familiar powersuit-clad figure.

He remembered the man from his first visit to the bridge, the fast-talking engineer that neither Captain Rogers nor that Wilson fellow had seemed to like particularly much.

The name, however, escaped him.  Something about Turk, or Stank, or... "oh, Stark!"

"Yes?"

"What?  Oh, sorry, was just trying to remember your name.  It's... been a long couple days."

"For us, too.  But call me Tony; I may be older than I look but hearing 'Mr Stark' always makes me feel like I'm becoming my father."  Tony's tone was flippant, but Bruce could pick out the subtle hunted look in his eyes.  Don't ask about his father then.  Right.

"Tony, then.  Pleasure to make your acquaintance.   Er I mean we did before... but now..."

"Charmed, I'm sure."  Tony's words could have come across as sarcastic, but somehow they just felt comfortable, if slightly teasing.  Bruce was further mollified when Tony stuck out his gauntleted hand, and stepped forward to shake it gingerly.

"So, uh, what are you working on?"

"Oh, not much.  There's a bunch of old kit plans in this fabsim, designs for Mauraders, Siege Tanks, you name it.  Thing is a lot of it's outdated or was still in prototype phase when our noble friends absconded with this beaut, and there's been nobody to dig through this looking for gems.  Hey, take a look at this and tell me what you see?"

Bruce leaned over the terminal, which was currently displaying plans for a roughly spherical craft with a large radar display above.  It looked for all the world like one of the old Science Vessels, but shifted away from the disc shape, and with its pontoons reconfigured for better shielding.  "Is that... is that what I think it is?"

"Yep, the mythical SciV 7, almost made it into production before the whole SciV series was mothballed in favor of the Raven line.  A right shame if you ask me - not everything is improved by strapping more guns to it, and believe me when I tell you that's coming from someone with more than a healthy love of dakka."

"I know what you mean.  The Raven's got a good sensor suite; the advance team at Agria had access to one, and we were using the scans up until...."  A wince of pain at the life now gone forever.  "Anyway, the fab capacities of the Raven were nice, but the experimentation and analytics of the SciV series were hard to give up.  I guess they just wanted something with more military application.  Search and destroy gets better funding than xenobiology these days."

"I was thinking about the SciV's mobile repair capacity, but fair point.  Anyway the fabsim says there's still some containment issues, and gamma rads are not exactly the sort of partycrashers that make for a good time, so I'm going to poke around a bit with the fabsim, see if I can get the rads under control in simulation, and convince some hapless do-gooder to take one out for a test drive and tell me if any body parts start itching unusually or, y'know, falling off."

"Wait, you're working with gamma rads in this thing?  What were you going to use for the extra shielding?"  Bruce leaned over.  They were shoulder to shoulder now.

"Oh, I dunno.  Aluminum and polyethylene are the classic couple for rad shielding when weight's a concern, right?"

"Normally that would be okay, but with this sievert count you'll want to go with full-on GZ shielding around the core, at least on the primary axis.  Here, let's see..."

An hour later, the core containment was locked down but the flight stabilizers were failing under the increased load.  "Don't trouble your pretty little head about it", Tony assured Bruce.  "This thing was stuck in development hell for years and we're not going to crack it in one sitting."

A part of Bruce's mind recognized the hubris of what they were attempting.  Yet... "looking at what we've got so far, I think it's solvable.  I've got some of my old gamma research on a datapad somewhere, pretty sure it made it off planet in the evacuation.  If I can find it, I should be able to tailor the shielding to the particular harmonics, and we might shave maybe 10 percent off the shielding weight."

Tony looked impressed.  Bruce had the suspicion the man didn't impress easily.  As with everything else though, Tony played it cool, responding in his normal flippant tone, "sounds like a plan.  And I can beef up the stabilizers, possibly even without something else going pear-shaped.  Meantime, there's some other low-hanging fruit in the fabsim that doesn't involve enough gamma rays to make you glow in the dark.  There's an old beta version of the Maurader suit in here and I may or may not have had a hand in designing the improved autoloaders in the current model but you didn't hear that from me.  Point is, I can work this up with some tweaks the bigwigs wouldn't sign off on, maybe a couple hours’ work tops.  I'll comm you if I see anything up your alley though."

 That seemed to Bruce like a good excuse to make an exit.  He waved goodbye, stumbled over to the lift and then to his room, and slipped into a deep sleep before he even knew he'd hit the bed.

\---------------------------

Bruce woke the next morning strangely refreshed in a way that had little to do with the amount of sleep he'd had.  He worried about dress code until realizing the only personal effects to make it off Agria had been what was at the old HQ, so he settled for a lab coat over his bedraggled civvies.

 The bridge crew was in full swing by the time he got there.  Steve and Sam were on one side of the mission holotable, with Tony on the other.  With a better sense of the dynamics at play, Bruce figured his proper place was halfway in between.  He noticed Tony was still in his suit.  When did the man sleep?

But now Sam was starting the briefing.  "Good morning gentlemen, Tony.  First, let me start with the good news - the Hydra advance has largely slowed.  There's been no new full scale invasions of a human world in the past 24 hours.  The United Forces navy has been mobilized, refugee operations are progressing, and the immediate crisis seems to have passed.  The bad news is that there's still probing attacks on several of the core worlds, and more activity from Char than we've seen since the end of the last war, so whatever's going on here, it isn't over yet."

"Now since some of you may not have heard," Sam continued, looking mostly at Bruce, "we picked up a rather unusual artifact on New Brooklyn, and the Hydra seemed drawn to it."  Bruce found his heartrate immediately spiking, but Sam assured him, "It's okay, our... associate, Mr. Stark, has it properly shielded now.  But there's more of these, and Mr Stark says he has sources that'll pay handsomely for any we acquire.  Which brings us to this."

Sam's fingers tapped on the display, showing known Hydra movements across the sector, a flurry of red spreading like cancer from the hub of Char, mostly towards the Core Worlds of the United Planets, but...

"What's this blotch going off the map to the antispinward over there", Bruce inquired.

"We think that's a second artifact", Steve said with a confidence that spoke of more than just intuition.  "Based on the Asgardian starcharts we received from Hogun in the first war, that should be a Svartálf world.  They're no friends of Asgard, but about as ancient."

Steve turned his piercing eyes on Tony.  "Now I told you it was worth my time to keep these out of Pierce's hands, and that goes double for the Swarm.  But I also told you I'm not going to throw my men's lives away on a suicide mission.  Going up against the Svartálfar and the Swarm at the same time seems like an awfully good way to lose everything we've worked for here."

"I'll take a look at that, thank you," Tony mumbled, spun the map, and peered in close.  "Let's see... hey Steve, back in our Robin Hooding days, what was the name of the warden's daughter we rescued, you remember, with the blue hair?"

"Jexica.  And no, we are not pulling that stunt again."

"It worked with Jexica", Tony quipped.

"Only because she knew how to use that sword."

Bruce looked over at Sam and pleaded with his eyes for some insight into what they were talking about.  Sam looked just as confused.

After going back and forth with Tony a few more time, Steve turned to acknowledge the other two.  "What Tony's suggesting is that we approach as unobtrusively as we can, wait until the two forces are engaged, and try to sneak the artifact away from them while they're both distracted.  It can work, but it's risky."

There was a moment of quiet around the holotable.  Bruce felt Steve's eyes on him, a subtle cue that perhaps someone, or more than someone, wasn't thinking about this objectively enough.

Let's think.  The artifacts are important.  How important?  Could be world-shaking, could just be some hard cash.  Average that out.  Use that to calculate the weighted probability... too many variables, confidence interval too wide for the results to mean anything.  "Could the error bars be tightened?"

"What?"

"Sorry, what? Oh, right I said that aloud.  I was thinking though, we don't really know anything.  How risky would it be to jump into the system, see what the lay of the land is?"

Bruce looked at Steve.  Steve looked at Sam.  Sam pursed his lips.  "Tolerable.  We'll be in trouble if we land in range of a Scourge swarm, but odds of that anywhere outside Char airspace are slim."

"Make it happen."  And that was it, Steve had spoken and the bridge crew jumped to life.  Some of the finest ever Terran-made astrogation terminals sprung to life as helmsmen entered the appropriate sequences, a brief alert sounded in the lower decks, and the Falcon headed off into the fringes of Svartálf space.

\---------------------------

Bruce gathered by the excited conversation between Sam and Steve that the situation on the ground was favorable, so he and Tony vacated to the cantina while tactical planning began in earnest.

With the colonists off ship, any who hadn't enlisted with the Howling Commandoes at least, the cantina was a much saner place with no lines and plenty of table space.  They placed their orders, found a booth table with a good degree of privacy, and Tony managed to slide his suit onto the bench in a way that made it look natural. 

"So," Bruce said after the settled down with their drinks, "did you make any more progress in the fabsim after I left?"

Tony flashed a charming smile.  "You clearly don't know me well enough yet.  Yeah, I got the Marauder plans sorted out and into field testing for this mission.  The mobile grenade fabbers in the arms gained a bit of efficiency over the UF's model I helped with, so there's a stronger bang at the end.  Feel free to salute my greatness any time you want."

"Wait, you worked for the UF?"

"Didn't I say that earlier?  Guess it slipped my mind.  Yeah, did for a while, some interesting projects but too much red tape, left a couple years ago for an independent firm called the Mobius Foundation.  Don't worry, I'm not here to sell out your saviors."

Bruce sensed a certain tension to Tony's words.  Clearly there was a lot being left unsaid.  Keeping his voice as light as he could manage, he asked, "so what are you here for, then?"

Tony looked Bruce right in the eyes, the tension ratcheting up another several notches.  "I've been sent to make sure Steve gets the artifacts."

Bruce blinked hard, and struggled to control his face.  Been sent?  Tony didn't seem the type to let things like that slip by accident.  But the reply was uncharacteristically curt, with none of Tony's usual elaborations.  There must be things at work here that Tony wouldn't, or couldn't, talk about. 

Bruce respected that, but also couldn't bring himself to let the matter slip entirely.  Tony's motives were clearly off limits, so he shifted the topic slightly.  "What's all this mess about artifacts, anyway?  A Svartálf world's got to be chock full of fascinating things, but Sam made it sound like this is something special."

"It is."  Tony was easing back now, and seemed to take a moment to collect his thoughts before giving Bruce an appraising eye.  "What if I told you there were stones with a density less than granite, that are opaque to neutrinos, but have a constant passive psi emission?"

"I'd tell you to stop watching so many holos, except I have a sinking feeling you're going to tell me we've got one on-board right now."

"Two, soon.  Anyway a source I trust says the Svartálves worship them as quasi-divine religious mumbo jumbo because they come from the Titans.  And the Titans are, supposedly, some sort of mystical precursor to both the Asgardians and Hydra, and I guess the Svartálves too if you buy into the theory that they're just a divergent strain of nocturnal Asgardians.  Bio-engineers from beyond time and space, or something like that."  Tony waggled his fingers in the air all impressed-like.

"Wow.  I mean - wow.  That's... that's some crazy stuff.  I guess that's the thing in the nanomesh down in the lab?  And... geeze, that's some intense xenocosmology.  I've read hints in that direction, of a common origin for the two dominant species in our galaxy, but we know for a fact humans developed independently and much more recently, so I always wrote it off as speculation.  I remember the journal though, and... oh, who was the author...."

Bruce stared at his drink for a good ten second.  Xenocosmology was an insular field and the article had struck him because it was coming from one of the top names, and had phrased the precursor hypothesis as an assumed given on their way to a subtler point about the nature of psionic talent in extraterrestrials.  He'd had a really unusual name too, one that had struck him as a pseudonym despite being attached to... what was that research institute Tony had mentioned...

"Oh!  You work with Dr Ikol Laufeyson, don't you!"


	3. Interlude (One thing)

_...Kyla Velassi detained for selling controlled substances..._  
_...Howling Commandos implicated in multiple acts of terrorism..._  
_...Hydra forces advancing across all fronts..._  
_...Millions flee...._  
_...This is UPN with Mitchell Ellison...._

"This is Mitchell Ellison, live from UPN with Karen Page. Tonight we're going to discuss the infamous Winter Soldier. Scientists and military insiders have long speculated that the enigmatic alien is, in fact, an infested human."  
"That's right Mitchell. Is it possible that the leader of Hydra has a human heart?"  
"More importantly, Karen - could this mean some kind of human-Hydra alliance is possible?"  
"Mitchell, there's never been any evidence - at all - to suggest that infested humans retain their free will."  
"You make a good point, Karen. The question is then, how do we kill him?"  
"That's one I think we all can agree on. If humanity is to survive, the Winter Soldier needs to be eliminated."

\---------------------------------------

Rapid gaussfire.  Too loud and too close.  Not the tight controlled bursts covered in training, but the sheer continuous fire of desperation.

Screams.  Hard to tell how many voices.  Some in rage, some in fear, some in both.  The sounds of men and women accustomed to dominance and power, suddenly being rendered helpless and powerless.

Blood.  Or other fluids.  Hard to tell through the grainy distortion of nightvision software fighting just as hard and just as unsuccessful as the marines to produce a clear picture over the brilliant gaussfire flashes all around.

The Winter Soldier, eyes glowing with phosphorescent light, carving his way through the defenders like a chainsaw through a tub of lard.

A last image before the feed cut out, the face of the man once known as James Buchanan Barnes, totally obscured by rage and infestation.  Not the face of a soldier completing the mission, but of a man so consumed by pain that it washed over him and through him and out of him in a relentless wave of violence and destruction that would set the entire galaxy aflame.

 Tony tapped his gauntletted finger on the controls, pausing the feed.  Around him, the day bridge of the Falcon lay dark and dormant while the gruntwork of running the ship happened elsewhere.

A footstep behind him, polished boot on metal floor.  "That's funny, Tony, I don't recall giving you access to our database."

"I don't recall asking permission", Tony replied as he turned to quirk a grin at Sam.  "Anyway, I'm just catching up on current events."

Sam stepped over to take a look at the feed, and sighed.  "Just don't let Steve catch you watching things like that."

"Y'know, that's one thing I don't get", said Tony.  "I mean, everyone lost someone.  Billions killed, millions more infested, it was a whole big thing if I recall.  So why's he special?"  Tony jabbed a red and gold finger at the screen accusingly.

Sam pursed his lips.  "Honestly... I don't know if there's a good answer for that.  He was a Ghost before being taken, one of the best as I heard, so maybe that had something to do with it.  And Zola had plans for him, made him special I guess.  But he's the only one to keep their memories after being turned."

"You're telling me that monster remembers being human?"  Tony had gone very still.

"Yes... and no.  Towards the end of the First War, after the destruction of Zola, he contacted us.  Let us believe there was hope for him, told us what we needed to do to get him free of Hydra once and for all.  Turns out, he was just trying to take out his rivals and gain control of the whole Swarm.  That last offensive of the First War, where he burned a dozen worlds before disappearing back to Char?  That was him as 'free' as he's ever going to get."

Tony stared at the screen for a long minute.  His voice quieter than Sam had ever heard it, he said, "my parents died in that last offensive."

Sam watched the pain envelope Tony's face, giving the moment the sanctity it deserved before responding, "as you said, we all lost someone."

Tony met Sam's eyes, and for a moment it didn't matter that neither liked nor trusted the other.  Later they could go back to snipes and sarcasm, but for a moment it was enough simply to share in the other's grief.

But the moment passed.  Tony, with an exaggerated stretching movement through the suit, turned to leave before pausing.  "Hey, flyboy.  What do you think our good friend Steve will do if we run into him again?"

"I don't know", said Sam with honesty.  "I really don't know."

Tony's voice was devoid of passion as he met Sam's eyes for the last time that night.  "Monster like that, there's only one thing you can do...."

\---------------------------------------

_...KMC denies responsibility for refugee massacres..._  
_...Estimated war dead in the billions..._  
_...1st fleet engage Hydra in York system..._  
_...Core worlds fortified..._  
_...This is UNN with Mitchell Ellison..._

"Thanks for joining us. Our own Karen Page is reporting live from the refugee ship Skynyrd II, in orbit around the planet Meinhoff."  
"Mitchell, the death toll out here is soaring. Massive refugee fleets like this one are struggling to reach the safety of the core worlds. Many of them won't. They're short on food, water and hope -"  
"Karen, we'll discuss how the Dominion will rescue those worlds when we get there!"  
"There's a lot of talk about rescue among the refugees, but they are pinning their hopes on para-military and rebel groups such as the Howling Co-"  
"Great report Karen! Live from a refugee ship over Meinhoff, where everyone eagerly awaits the United Forces' return. Up next, an Ellison commentary: Refugees, are they really our responsibility?"


	4. Clear Sight (To the End)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Barton solves problems with insight.

Clint Barton, master assassin, arguably one of the most deadly humans alive, had tears in his eyes as he waved goodbye his adoptive children.  "Kitchen's fully stocked and the utilities have been paid up for the next three months under the standard aliases.  And there's enough terrazine in the canister for twice that, but don't use any more than you need.  Keep eachother out of trouble, you hear?  Oh, and don't forget to turn off the stove when you're done with it!  I love you guys, you hear?  You know I'm doing this for us, right?"

"We know," Wanda replied in her thick Kel-Morian accent no amount of coaching ever quite managed to suppress.  "And we're not children anymore.  We can take care of ourselves, almost as well as you can."

Pietro peeked into the kitchen, and tilted his head at Barton quizzically.  "You think three boxes of chips is fully stocked?  I know you mean well, but I'll be out of snack food in a week."

Wanda punched her brother in the arm.  Pietro laughed.  Barton wiped away a tear.

It had been three years since Barton had helped bust himself and a few dozen others out of the infamous Red Room, where future members of the elite Ghost program were trained.  Barton had volunteered as an adult, already an accomplished special agent and with latent psi talents too minor for the standard tests to pick him up as a kid.  Most of the others were not so lucky to have been given a choice.  Anyone identified with the talent was forcibly recruited, purportedly to receive expert mentorship and special training on how to use their skills to better mankind, fully funded by the benevolent government at plush, pastoral academies.  Anyone in special ops knew that this was a cover for the Ghost program.

Many knew the truth.  Few knew the reality.

Barton had graduated from some of the toughest ops programs ever seen, willfully subjecting himself to punishment beyond what most could endure.  But the Ghost program was something else entirely, mixing brutal physical training with intense psychoactives that left even him shaken.  Even worse was seeing the effect on the conscripted children who had never chosen this life and whose parents were only too glad to send them to such a prestigious academy.  The Maximoff twins in particular had shown exceptional psychic talents at a young age, and Barton had watched in horror as the program broke them as it had broken so many others.  Until he went rogue and busted them out, along with as many others as he could manage.

When he'd first signed up for the United Forces, Barton had done so to help keep the people of his world safe from threats within and without.  He figured he was still doing that now, and being branded a traitor and hunted by his former friends and allies just made it more challenging.  Some of the other former Ghosts felt the same, fewer than he'd hoped but more than he'd counted on, and they organized themselves under the self-styled title of "Spectres".  When the opportunity had presented itself to stage a massive jailbreak, they hadn't hesitated. 

They hadn't hesitated, but Natasha Romanoff had.  The most decorated of the Red Room's alumni, callsign "Black Widow", had Barton right in her sights, and had missed.  Natasha Romanoff missed, the round passing a neat centimeter from his neck.  Barton figured he could read her message clear enough, that she understood what he was doing, and why.  That she had her orders and followed them to the letter if not necessarily to the spirit when circumstances dictated.  She'd go back to her handlers and tell them he'd dodged, he'd outplayed her, but it wouldn't happen again.  Her reputation and position would remain intact, and she'd continue to operate freely as Pierce's left hand.  But the shot had been a kill shot.  That was its own message, that it _wouldn't_ happen again.  The next time, she'd end him and wouldn't lose sleep about it.  Or he'd have to end her first.

Barton was okay with that, either way.  He'd chosen his game and all there was to do was play it out as best he could.

For now, he had more pressing concerns.  One of the compounds from the Red Room's biochemical regime, terrazine, had shown fantastic results both in developing and stabilizing psychic talents.  Barton and the Maximoff twins had all been part of the test group, Project Shadowblade.  Give it to a latent and their talent would begin to manifest; give it to an active and they'd have more precision and control over their talent.  It was also addictive.  He could do without it, but Wanda and Pietro needed a steady supply, or their abilities would spiral out of control, and that was something none of them could afford.  And the supply he'd made off with wouldn't last forever.  He had money to burn, but any black market inquiries could make their way back to Natasha, even here on a fringe world.  He'd need to find someone off the grid, whose ethics weren't sold to the highest bidder, who bore the United Planets no love, and who had the resources to acquire the compound one way or another.  Fortunately, he had someone in mind.

He stepped out of the door, feeling the twins' eyes on him as he left.  He didn't look back.

Clint Barton, callsign "Hawkeye", reporting for duty.  Mission: intercept Steve Rogers.  Acquire terrazine.  Improvise from there.  No backup, no resources, no contingencies.  Back to the wall.

Time to put the game face back on. 

\------------------------------------

Barton pulled up to dock with the Falcon in his newly-acquired Wraith starfighter, cloaking field still cranked to full.  The ex-owner had been a bounty hunter working for some local mob bosses, and now had a neat little hole in his trachea as his body cooled in a back alley gutter.  Scavengers human and otherwise would strip him to the bone within hours, and nobody but his employers would miss him.  Barton had a lot worse on his conscience.

An alarm sounded as the Wraith docked.  That was okay.  Drop the cloak to announce his presence formally, and sit with engines off, cool and nonthreatening as possible while an appropriate welcome committee assembled itself. 

After waiting a couple minutes, Barton keyed the side hatch to open and stood with his hands visible and empty, the helmet to his jury-rigged Ghost suit (or Spectre suit now, he supposed) completely off and resting on the bench beside him.  Three ranks of marines were arrayed in a semicircle, spread wide in case of explosives, and out front was the striking figure of Steve Rogers in full battle gear, shield forward but steel-blue eyes calm and calculating through the clear faceplate.  Barton felt a small shiver as he met those eyes for the first time, and quietly re-evaluated his odds should he and The Captain ever have to square off against eachother.  The man was dangerous in a way that needed no help from technology or psychic powers.

Still, the die was cast, and there was nothing for it at this point.  "Hi", he said with a small wave, "how's it going, Cap?"

"It's been an interesting day, and getting more interesting by the minute", Steve Rogers responded without hesitation.  "How about you tell me what you're doing on my ship?"

"Not going to ask how, first?  I'd have thought that'd be the more interesting question."

"How can wait.  Answer the question."

The man was exasperating, but Barton would be lying to himself if he'd said he'd have it any other way.  Still, he couldn't bring himself to fold that easily.  "You recognize what I'm wearing, right?"

"Stealth suit, Opal series, Mark 12.  You're either a Ghost or killed one to get it.  Given the outdated model, my bet's on the latter."

That was more insight than Barton was expecting.  Where would a man like Steve Rogers have learned to recognize individual models from?  "Oh right," he muttered, "you were with Bucky, weren't you?"

The Captain's eyes went ice-cold, and the gun that had previously been loose at his side was instantly trained on Barton's center of mass.  "You've got ten seconds to answer the question." 

That had clearly struck a nerve; time to back down.  Barton raised his hands in surrender.  "Easy there Cap'n.  No offence meant.  I met Bucky a couple times back in the day and he mentioned someone like you is all.  I'm Clint Barton, ex-Ghost, and I think we can help eachother."

The gun stayed level.  "What was your codename?"

"Hawkeye.  No special reason you'd have heard of me though."

"I haven't."  The gun relaxed slightly though.  "What was your talent?"

"Clear Sight.  Both kinds."  A joke, and a subtle coded message.  Clear Sight was better known as Clairvoyance, and in popular culture conjured up images of remote scrying or divination.  For Barton that manifested as an intuition on where to go in order to find things, which was how he'd made this rendezvous.  But it could also mean straightforward and entirely literal clear vision, a trait documented in enough Ghosts to be recognized in the more casual terminology, but especially pronounced for Barton.  He'd been something close to 20:5 when he'd entered the Ghost program and more like 20:2 at last test.  If Bucky had indeed filled Steve in on the slang of active Ghost agents, he'd know both meanings, and know he was legit.

Rogers seemed to sigh internally and the gun went back down.  His glance still carried a warning though.  "Come with me and I'll introduce you around.  Just keep those hands where I can see them."

That suited Barton fine.  With exaggerated nonchalance and pointedly ignoring the armed escort, he strolled after Steve Rogers.  He was honestly rather disappointed they didn't pat him down, after he'd gone to all the trouble of removing every single one of the weapons normally hidden on his person.  Did he trust Barton to that extent?  Or was he just assuming that someone with Ghost training could get a weapon past a pat down if they wanted?  No way to tell for sure, so Barton discarded the question as irrelevant.

The bridge was spacious and lavish, an ode to Pierce's self-importance.  Barton was well aware of the Falcon's history - the hijacking of the soon-to-be flagship straight out of drydock had been hushed up well enough but was still considered quite the coup in intelligence circles.  That was the danger of too much automation; a single defector in the right place, a daring infiltration during the midnight shift, a few unlucky maintenance techs ejected in an escape pod, and that was all it had taken.  That and nerves of steel with talent to match.

But now Rogers was introducing him around.  There was Sam Wilson, a clean-cut bridge officer who radiated military training from every pore.  Then Dr Bruce Banner, about as different from Wilson as conceivable, shaggy and haggard, wearing a lab coat over bedraggled civvies, face open as a book and full of hopeful panic.  Finally was Tony Stark, a flamboyant man in what was clearly some sort of custom power armour. Barton had been around enough trauma to recognize the furtive glances of someone who acted confident and controlled until they snapped and did something profoundly stupid.  He knew, because he'd seen the same look in the mirror back during his time in the Red Room.  He hoped things went well for Stark, but made a mental note to be as far away as possible when the fecal matter impacted the turbine.  He had enough on his plate as it was.

Finally, Rogers turned back to him and said, his voice cool and controlled, "this is my command staff.  You said you think we can help eachother.  What is it you want us to do, and why do you think we should do it for you?"

"I want you to get a large supply of an addictive and incredibly illegal gas, and you should do it because Spectres pay their debts." 

He was met with a chorus of blank stares.  "Maybe I should give you the whole story..."

\-------------------------

Barton leaned against a banister while the others discussed.  Steve Rogers hadn't said a word since introducing him, but Wilson's eyes flickered to him constantly as he argued with Tony.  "I understand the humanitarian angle, I really do, but we've got enough on our plates without getting every Ghost in the galaxy after us."

"Way I see it, you already have every Ghost in the galaxy after you", snapped Tony.  "And isn't this what you do, charge in heroically to save the damsel in distress?  No offence, Bruce."

Bruce's eyes pinched a little at that.  "None taken, just don't try to put me in a dress or anything."

"Aw, but you'd look so cute in one too", Stark said with a wink.

Sam sighed to himself, then rallied.  "If it was a simple rescue op, that would be one thing.  But this rerrazine sounds like bad news, and we don't even know we can trust anything he says.  No offence, Mr Barton."

"None taken", Barton replied with total sincerity.  "You've got no reason to trust me, and anything I say or do to convince you otherwise might just be a ruse."

"Oh that's clever", Tony chimed in, "telling us why we shouldn't trust you as a way of showing that we can trust you.  I can see why you got top marks at spy school."

Bruce raised his hand and caught Tony's eye.   "Wait, which side were you arguing for again?"

"Whichever side interests me more", Tony said, somehow producing the visual effect of a shrug all the way through his bulky powerarmor.

Sam Wilson pinched his nose as if he was getting a migraine, which Barton figured probably wasn't far off the truth, and looked over at Rogers helplessly.

Rogers stepped forward, and locked eyes with each in turn.  "Sam, I hear your security concerns, and they're valid.  Tony, I understand you're in favour of chaos, but you don't actually have a vote here.  Bruce, I haven't actually heard an opinion from you."

"Well, uh... I can see a bunch of ways this can go.  Between Tony and me, I'm pretty sure we can handle the stuff.  And if he's telling the truth, no offence - Tony don't roll your eyes at me, he's right there, I'm not going to insult someone who can kill me by staring too hard - _if_ he's telling the truth, there's nobody else that can help those kids.  So I guess the question is, do we believe his story, and do we have higher priorities that conflict?"

Everyone waited while Rogers studied Barton's face.  Barton watched back, sky-blue eyes locking with ocean-blue, both still and calm as the horizon between them. 

After a long moment, Rogers turned back to the huddle.  "He's telling the truth.  And I know what you're going to say, Sam, that doesn't mean I trust him, but getting some ex-Ghosts on our side is worth some risks.  Still, our top priority is those artifacts.  We have two now, and we know both Pierce and... the Winter Soldier are after then.  There's a lot we don't know here, but my gut tells me we need to keep these things out of the wrong hands, and that's time-critical.  Bruce, I want you working on ways to track them.  Get help from Tony if you need it; he seems to know a thing or two about them.  Mr Barton... we'll help, but it may be some time before we can get our hands on something like that."

"Yeah, no, understood."  That was about as generous as he could have expected, and the twins should have a healthy supply of terrazine left.  He checked his chrono by reflex anyway.  "Yeah, plenty of time."

"In the mean time, if you can give us an indication of where to look, we'll keep an eye open.  If we can get our hands on it without going too far out of our way, all the better for everyone involved.

"Sure.  So, the biggest supply's going to be with the Red Room, but that's a whole different nut to crack.  Straight from the source might be easier, abandoned Asgardian or Svart-elf worlds."

The bridge crew shared a significant glance.

"What'd I say?"

\-------------------------

Barton found himself a good place to settle down in the cantina, up on the barely-used mezzanine overlooking the main floor.   Most of the patrons passed through without even a glance upwards, and the few that did notice him seemed to pay him no mind.  This ship seemed to attract more than its share of stragglers and oddballs.  A vaguely racy holo dancer gyrated in the corner, program stuck on perpetual loop, as the jukebox blared out lowest-common-denominator rock and country.  For all its contrast with the ornate pretentiousness of the rest of the ship, the almost deliberate tackiness of it was right up Barton's alley.  Way he saw it, a man should know his filet mignon from his steak tartare, but when you want a cheeseburger, you want a cheeseburger.

After a time, two of the bridge crew came in, Dr Banner who didn't notice him at all accompanied by that Tony fellow who noticed him immediately and then pointedly ignored him.  More from idle curiosity than any nefarious intent, he tried following their conversation by lipreading.  He caught the words for "artifact", "emanation", and "Svart-elf" a few times, but most of the conversation was couched in impenetrable technical terms.  Even the best lipreaders, and there were none better than him, can only function if they know the vocabulary being used.  He halfheartedly raised the gain on his cochlear implants, but between the intense ambient noise and his own weak base hearing, it wasn't much improvement at all.  If it was important, he figured, he'd hear about it later. Or he could intimidate it out of Dr Banner given five minutes and an unsharpened toothbrush, but he'd rather not.  The man was so full of holes, Barton felt a little protective of him.  He'd seen damage like that in the Red Room too, in children starved of human warmth and affection.  If Banner's only friend was Tony, those needs weren't going to be met any time soon.

Eventually the pair left, so he occupied himself by eavesdropping on the other patrons.  There was "Dum-Dum" with his ridiculously archaic hat; "Morita" with his sly wit; "Junior" with the mannerisms of a much younger man.  They moved with the easy relaxation of family, small motions of comfort and trust only seen among people who've built a real tribe for themselves.  It wasn't that rare, really, but always made him a little jealous when he saw it.  People who'd been through special ops never quite had that, even among themselves.  They could never be quite that unguarded.  It was only with the twins that he could just be a person instead of an agent.  With the twins, or alone in his head.

He missed them terribly and wondered, not for the first time, how they were doing.

While he was lost in thought, someone had cranked the volume on the news.  The UPN was state-controlled, but not well.  Watching it was a good way to find out what the government wanted you to know, which was useful in its own right, but also frequently served as a vehicle for others to pass along their own subtler messages.  Ghosts could leave a knickknack in Mitchell Ellison's office to pass a message to eachother or to Spectres, and revolutionary groups could pass a message on through Karen Page's end too.  This was useful enough across the intelligence community that there was a mutual nonaggression pact where media figures were concerned.  Karen Page was allowed to survive because Mitchell Ellison was allowed to survive.  Even in the bitterest of feuds, it was reassuring to have one thing that was sacrosanct.

But now the UPN them was playing and the scrolling bar at the bottom was rattling off the day's headlines.

 _...KMC abandons outlying worlds as losses mount..._  
_...Wakanda mobilizes..._  
_...Conscription stations open across core worlds..._  
_...Markets slump after Kelanis defeat...  
_.. _.Kyla Velassi to stand trial for distributing controlled substances..._  
_...This is UPN with Mitchell Ellison...._

"Mitchell Ellison, UPN. Your first, last and only stop for the truth. Tonight our own Karen Page uncovers a secret shadow war, waged by our brave United Forces Ghosts, against a ruthless, hidden enemy."

Hey now, that was surprisingly direct.

"Thanks Mitchell. I'm talking live with [redacted], a specialist in the Dominion [redacted]. [Redacted], I understand that you and your comrades have been [redacted] against a [redacted] of [redacted]. What can you tell us about that?"

"Well Karen," said a heavily distorted voice coming from a shadowy figure, "I'm not allowed to say much, but I can tell you [redacted] and his allies will not [redacted]. We expect to [redacted] them very soon."

"I think we'll all sleep a little better tonight, knowing our Dominion forces are watching over us. For UPN, I'm Mitchell Ellison."

And with that, the volume was back down and the cantina resumed its normal subdued buzz of conversation. 

Barton considered the broadcast.  Nat was playing an interesting game, showing up like that herself.  Probably a whole bunch of messages there, not all of them for him.  The "ruthless, hidden enemy" was an overt reference to the Spectres, but the line about allies would indicate Captain Steve Rogers to anyone paying attention, an allusion to his propensity towards collecting ragtag bands of plucky rebels.  Clearly, Nat knew he was there.  Equally clearly, she wanted him to know it, and wanted it to be common knowledge in the circles that she knew it.  And she'd met with Karen Page, not Mitchell Ellison, which was its own message.  So she was planning action against him and the Falcon, but it wasn't going to be a direct assault or she wouldn't have tipped her hand like that.  And she wasn't going to put maximum effort into it, or she'd have gone through Mitchell.  Nat was telling Barton she'd been ordered into action, but it wasn't personal and not to worry about it too much.  She was his adversary, not his enemy, for now.  And one final message for him - the whole stunt wouldn't have been needed unless the message needed saying.  So she was still expecting to come after him eventually.  Fair warning.

He found himself craving cheeseburger again.

At some point while he was lost in thought, Steve Rogers had entered the room and was presently talking to a slender brunette with ops agent bearing.  Watching their lips, he was pretty sure of the term "mercenary" featuring prominently, "contract" a few times, the name "Mrs Hill", and something about either a Mai Tai or Muay Thai?  Mixed drinks or martial arts aside, he figured Mrs Hill was a security contractor, a go-between who set up more specialized mercenary outfits with prospective clients.  Such contractors lived and died on their discretion, on both sides, and were studiously impartial.  No threat, might be good for a bit of shop talk.

But now Rogers had made eye contact and was mounting the steps to the mezzanine.  Barton turned and gave him a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes.  "What's up, Cap?"

"Just trying to keep my bird in the air.  Some days it's easier than others, doesn't make it any less important."

"I hear that.  Got two kids back home.  Been through a lot, trying to do right by them, sometimes makes my life a touch more complicated than I like."

"Still worth it?"

"Still worth it.  You?"

"Yeah."

The Captain settled into the chair with a sort of sigh that had nothing to do with breath, the audible manifestation of stiffness leaving his body.

They sat like that for a while, two old soldiers comfortable with eachother's silence.

Eventually Steve Rogers leaned over.  "So.  You knew Bucky, huh?"

"Yeah.  Not well, but yeah.  He was an instructor at the Red Room, you know, back when I was going through.  One of the better ones, did what he could to help us get through but left before we staged our little jailbreak.  Bit of a legendary figure, maybe even better than Nat... er, Black Widow."

"Hmm.  That was before I met him then.  And he mentioned me?"

"Well, I may have run into him while he was with Pierce.  Pursuing parallel interests, shall we say.  No names, but he mentioned some blond supermodel."

Steve chuckled, and dipped his eyes down in some private memory.  Barton was close enough, and his eyes sharp enough, to see individual vessels in his cheek dilate in a subtle blush.

But the moment passed and Steve's features hardened.  "And you know what happened after?"

"More or less.  What's in the news, and some rumors.  A shame, he was a good man."

"Was?"  Steve's eyes were sharp as needles.

"What, you know something I don't?"

Steve was silent, tension flowing through his jaw, north to south, east to west.  Barton suspected others found the man unreadable, but the subtle signs were there and Barton missed nothing.  Steve was reviewing memories, emotionally charged ones.  A flicker of the eye to the side meant realizing a counterpoint; a flicker of the eye downward meant realizing the counterpoint was valid; a contraction of blood vessels meant resignation.  Eventually the man spoke quietly.  "No. I suppose not."

"Want to talk about it?"

"Not really."

They sat like that for a few minutes more, looking out from the mezzanine as life continued below them.

When he thought the time was right, Barton looked over.  "So where does that leave us?" 

As if in answer, Steve took out a gun, S&W Ursadak .6 cal, one of the largest chemical propellant handguns ever made. Clearly a custom job from the detailing.  Chemical propellant weaponry had been phased out not long after man reached the stars, largely due to ammo constraints and unreliable function in extreme weather conditions.  A gauss flechette had a mere fraction of the mass of a bullet and supported truly shocking magazine sizes.  And with the magnetic hyperacceleration a modern gaussrifle could provide, the impact was decidedly similar over short range.

Similar, but not necessarily better.  When you really wanted to put a hole in something, you needed the raw power of a sizeable slug.  And after a thousand years of trying, the best ways to get a solid object moving quickly was still to make something explode behind it.  Ghost sniper rifles use a hybrid chemical/gauss system for maximum power, but that required a barrel well over a meter long.  The beast laying on the table in front of him could fit in a hip holster and still break the stride of anything that wasn't covered in battle plate, and many things that were.  But it would be unreliable in unusual atmospheres, and the recoil would jack up the toughest arm.  It was a show piece, an ego-booster, unless you had a very specific purpose in mind.

Barton picked it up.  Safety on, chamber clear, trigger locked.  No chances with this one.  Good condition, expertly maintained.  In the mag, a single round.  An extremely specific purpose, then. 

One might say a singular purpose.

He passed the gun back after double checking the safety.  "Gun like that, normally I'd say is overkill, but under the circumstances it's about right." 

After a moment, he added, "you realize, you fire this thing, it's point blank only and you'll be wide open for any followup.  End of the line, right?"

Steve stared at him like he'd seen a ghost.  "Yeah," he said.  "To the end of the line."

\-------------------------

The next few days were busy for the Falcon's crew.  Dr Banner was still working on a way to track the artifacts, but Tony's associates with the Mobius Foundation had the location of another of the artifacts everyone was after - a dead world named Xil that was also, conveniently, a likely source of terrazine.  Information on Xil was sparse; the old Confederacy had charted it and planned for a full archaeology crew before Pierce rose to power and cut funding on exploration and non-military research.  Initial reports confirmed the world had once supported a civilization of some kind, but they had either died out or been evacuated suddenly, leaving many ruins but nothing multicellular on record.  A lack of similar ruins on nearby planets suggested the civilization hadn't been spacefaring, but that's as far as the charting team ever got. 

Mobius, via Tony, was barely more informative.  "Way I heard it, the artifact's signature was buried in the initial report.  Pencilpushers didn't even know what they were looking at until Dr Laufeyson got a look at it.  Mobius got a team up there, equipped with... well, the report calls it a laser drill but honestly... Bruce, tell them about the laser drill."

"What, me?  I mean, it's one hundred and seventy four gigawatts, right?"

Steve, Sam, and Barton all gave a blank stare.

Banner rubbed his forehead.  "Right, non-scientists have no sense of scale for large numbers.  How should I put this... do you guys know Kardashev values?"

Steve was faster on the uptake this time.  "No, but fill us in."

"The Kardashev scale is a rough measure of how advanced a civilization is, based on how much energy they process.  It's not a great measure, and results in a lot of estimation and numbers that sound more authoritative than they really are..."

Tony shot him a look.

"Right, right, the point.  The survey team pegged the Xillian civilization at about a 0.5 to 0.8, so fusion reactors and maybe some space probes and satellites, but basically stuck to the one world and still with room to grow there, no planetary megacities or anything.  Thing is, nothing a sub-1 Kardashev value civ could feasibly make would stand up to a tenth the kind of power this drill has.  It's beyond impressive.  It's... I mean, Tony's worked on some high end military contracts, and even he's..."

Bruce looked over at Tony helplessly.  Tony grinned back.  "It's okay, you can say it to them."  Towards the rest he clarified, "I told Bruce I want to have its babies.  What he's getting at here is that they wouldn't have brought in power like that unless there was something that needed it, meaning they found something on a K2+ scale.  The report doesn't say, but smart money's on Asgardian or Titan"

"Well that was evocative", said Sam, "but if they've already got a team there, I fail to see the point."

Tony went silent.  Bruce looked up at the group.  "The team's been dark since two days ago.  No action on the main or backup ansible.  We... uh, we suspect the worst."

Silence in the room.

"So... I mean there's that.  But, uh, there should be terrazine there?"

Steve looked grim.  "And potentially injured or stranded archaeologists?"

"Yeah," Bruce nodded.  "That too.  And the planned extraction team lost their ride in the recent Hydra offensive, so if there is anyone down there they've got no other way home."

Barton looked around the other four.  "So.  When do we pack?"

\---------------------------

Planetfall was 1400 by the ship's schedule but just at the first light of dawn by the dig site on Xil.  Scans from orbit had shown The Drill (Tony always managed to infuse the term with capital letters) fully deployed and theoretically operational, but no signs of life anywhere in the system. 

Steve led the ground team, consisting of two platoons of Howling Commandos as well as Tony, Dugan, and Morita.  Barton rode down separately with his assigned escort for the mission, a grim-looking man who introduced himself as Pinkerton but said to call him "Pinky".  He didn't mind the escort; Steve needed someone to keep an eye on him, and this Pinky fellow seemed to have some special ops training of his own.  

By the time Barton stepped out, a defensive perimeter was already taking shape.  A few bunkers and Longbolt turrets were already up and operational, and there were even a pair of newly fabbed siege tanks that Tony had rescued plans for out of the fabsim.  He joined Steve, Tony, and Dugan by the Laser Drill while Pinky waited behind him.  Morita joined moments later.

"Good to see everyone made it", said Steve.  "Just so we're all on the same page, I'll repeat the sitrep.  We've got no survivors from the first team, but signs of energy weapons used in the area, so we need to be prepared for an external attack.  Sam's got the Falcon on full alert and can screen from orbit.  Morita, you'll coordinate the men in bunkers and the siege tanks.  Dugan, keep those Longbolts operational and coordinate with Morita for any repair work that needs doing.  Tony -" 

"Point and click, right?"  Tony was smiling wider than Barton had yet seen.

"Yes, but reports from the valley aren't promising.  We've located the position it's sighted at, a vault-like structure of some unknown material.  There's scorch marks on it."  He let that sink in for a moment.   Multi-gigawatt lasers shouldn't leave scorch marks, at least not on the thing they're aimed at.  Pulling the trigger without a proper heatsink will result in plenty of scorch marks on the wrong end of the beam, but that's a different problem.

Tony didn't seem concerned though.  "Probably just an attenuation issue.  If it scorches, The Drill and I will get through it, trust me on that."

"Good to hear.  Barton, you know how to use that extractor unit we got for you?"

"Yep."  He hefted the portable vespene gas extractor.  It had been hastily modified to handle terrazine, and had a fraction of the yield of a proper refinery, but his needs were modest and there should be more than enough seeping from fissures and vents around the various ruins.  He and Pinky were to collect their terrazine while keeping an eye on the flanks.  Stay out of the way, leave the fighting to the soldiers.  Suited him fine.

"Good.   Now there's no word yet on - hold on."  Steve touched his earpiece.  "Yes... understood.  We'll be ready." 

Turning back to the group, he clarified, "Sam's reading multiple translocations.  Nothing big, but a lot of high energy sources, definitely advanced technology.  Could be -"

He never got a chance to finish the sentence. 

"MORE TERRAN THIEVES?  THE MYSTERIES OF THIS PLACE ARE FORBIDDEN!  YOU WILL PAY FOR YOUR TRANSGRESSION WITH YOUR LIVES!"

The words echoed formlessly through the camp, from everywhere and nowhere at once.  Barton could sense the psionic power behind it, the result of mental disciplines refined long before humanity had developed language.

 A lot of things began happening very quickly.  Barton and Pinky looked at eachother and both made a quiet egress from the camp as the first thunderous rumble of a hundred and seventy four gigawatts blazed to life behind them.  Barton immediately tuned out the relative harmonics from his cochlear implant; it left everything else sounding tinny, but he could still hear Steve shouting orders and Tony whooping ecstatically behind him.

"THEY SEEK TO BEFOUL THE LEGACY OF THE GODS!  DESTROY THEM!"

Svart-elven attack craft manoeuvred overhead, and one took a Longbolt missile to the ventral fin before spiraling to a heavy landing. 

 

Not their concern anymore.  Trust that the team would still be there when he got back, and make that as quick as possible.

The area outside the camp was broken ground, full of irregular man-high protuberances.  Whoever the architects had been, they'd favored triangles and tetrahedrons over squares and cubes, and millennia of weather hadn't blunted their structures, but it had shifted things around and covered much of it in soil and vegetation.  The result greatly resembled an academy obstacle course or live fire exercise.  Plenty of blind spots, plenty of cover, almost ideal ground for an operative like him.  He'd have given his right kidney to be up in a sniper roost looking over this field from above, but if he had to be boots on the ground, this wasn't bad.

He slipped from cover to cover with practiced ease, making rapid progress.  Pinky kept up admirably.  Barton remembered something from ancient history of field ops lore about the name Pinkerton.  A pseudonym, or lucky coincidence?  Irrelevant, discard the thought.

It was the work of a few minutes to find their way to one of the larger ruins and affix the jury-rigged extractor to the vents by its base.  The extractor began quietly humming to itself, the display indicating system failure as it vented vespene and retained terrazine, which was exactly what they wanted.  Barton keyed the override and let it proceed.  Pinky leaned into one of the boulder-like ruins and held his pared-down gaussrifle at the ready, watching his back.

Behind them, the staccato of gaussfire and the ominous thud of Siege Tank mortar rounds grew more intense.  Whatever was assaulting the camp wasn't having an easy time of it.  Humans were the _maknae_ of the galactic community, the Johnny-come-lately, the youngest of the spacefaring races in the sector by millennia.  Crude, reckless, irrational, physically inferior, with laughable technological prowess.  But they held our own.  Crude, but efficient.  Reckless, but irrepressible.  Irrational, but unpredictable.  They used their medivacs offensively and their siege weapons for defence. 

Barton had studied a concept in warfare theory called "the turn", a sudden transition in strategy.  A medieval garrison might weather a siege for weeks before charging out the front gates.  An army might make its presence known through lightning raids before disappearing behind impassible defences, or posture towards one target then attack another.  The human approach to warfare was wrought through with layer upon layer of deception and manipulation that was literally unthinkable to a hive mind like Hydra, or a telepathic super-race like the Asgardians or Svart-elves.  When everyone knew what the soldier across from them was thinking, there was room for conflict but not for deceit.  Humanity reigned as uncontested kings of deceit.

And the best part was, the aliens knew it.  Hydra, which understood only the total offence of the Blitzkreig, had needed to infest a human soldier to lead it.  Under the Winter Soldier, the Swarm had shown a level of treacherousness previously unseen in any alien species of any development level, anywhere in the galaxy.  Feints within feints, plots within plots, taxing even humanity's ability to match.  And they'd needed an intact human mind to do it.

And Asgard, in their overzealous campaigns to burn Hydra out of human space, had learned humans could pivot on a dime but seemed to have no sense of when or now.  In a way, one could fairly say they were more scared of humans than humans were of were of them.  Humans at least understood what it meant to face down a superior force, but they only knew that actions in human-controlled space were far less effective than they rationally should be.

Now the Svart-elves were learning it.  Barton watched as Tony pivoted The Drill and swept its beam across a massed Svart-elf force.  Defensive fields struggled to accommodate the onslaught, but blinked out one by one.  Arclight Siege Tanks had taught them that light attack forces wouldn't get far; now Tony had taught them that a massed heavy forces were a bad idea too.  Would the Svart-elves take the hint and back off?

"IT IS OUR SACRED DUTY TO STOP THESE DEFILERS!  BURN THEM TO ASHES!"

Guess not, thought Barton.  Nothing was ever easy. 

The extractor beeped.  Three of the seven error messages on the screen went from red to green.  Bad sign, that.  Meant this vent was dry.   He checked the capacity.  Three quarters full.  Not great but not bad.  It'd last the twins barely two weeks at the ridiculous rates the Red Room had used, but they'd spent the last few years gradually tapering off of it and could easily stretch it months if they were careful.  He'd resigned himself to the knowledge that they'd likely never be free of the foul stuff without their powers consuming them.  They were his kids.  They were flawed, and damaged, but so was he.  He'd do right by them or die trying.

He decided there was no point being greedy.  With a gesture to Pinky, they began moving back to base camp.

The ground leading back looked markedly different than it had just ten minutes ago.  Mortar fire had blasted some ruins, and polished others to a mirror sheen.  Broken Svart-elf craft and bodies peppered the landscape.  He hoped the defenders were fairing better. 

Up the field and away from them, The Drill was finally breaching the temple vault when another psionic transmission projected across the battlefield.

"STILL YOU PERSIST!  IT IS HERESY TO TOUCH THE ARTIFACTS OF THE BENEFACTOR!"

This time, the transmission distracted him at a key moment.  He slid around the corner of another tetrahedral ruin, only to run nearly headfirst into a squad of Svart-elf soldiers.

Shit.

He scrambled back behind the corner, but one had seen him and was pointing in eerie silence, as half a dozen other blank white masks turned towards him.

Pinky was behind him, unseen thus far.  Good.

Barton backed up slowly, signing behind him for Pinky to retreat behind cover and set up crossfire.

Sights on the corner he'd rounded.  Slow, careful steps back - no stumbling now.

A Svart-elf stepped out brazenly, without even checking its corners, and took a burst of Gaussfire for its trouble.  Defensive shielding flared to life around it, absorbing the kinetic impacts, but the shields had weak points and Barton readjusted his aim, squeezed the trigger once for a single gauss round just at the intersection of two planes of shielding, and the flechette passed neatly through the shield, and somewhat more messily through the Svart-elf's helmet.

One down.

Three more were rounding the corner now, but he was already pulling back away around an outcropping as energy weapons flared around him.  Couldn't count on that working twice in a row, especially not facing straight-on where the shields were strongest.  Lob a grenade over.  Loud bang, odor of oxidation from energy shields fizzling, no thuds of armored bodies falling though.  Shit!

Pinky opened fire from his flanking position.  One more down, Pinky pulling back.

Two sets of boots stepped through gravel towards him.

Clamber up the side of the tetrahedral ruin.  Exposed position - unsafe.  Elevated position - safe.  Competing instincts warred in Barton's brain and were silenced.  No thought.  Just kill.

Two marks passed under.  A slight shift of the foot, dust falls, no shield catches it.  Vulnerable.  Prey.

Clean shot, three flechettes each - one through head, two through center mass, millimeter chinks in the armor all that was needed.

In his mind, Barton often became a hunter, an archer, each flechette an arrow whistling through the air, arching in the parabolic motion of all matter projectiles, feathering his targets without hesitation or error.  It was something the Red Room had encouraged, an alter-ego that removed some of the burdens of conscious thought.  Barton the man had sympathies and mercies.  He killed when necessary, but weighed the costs and thought and felt.  Hawkeye the archer had none of those limits.  All good agents could sublimate their humanity to some degree, but the experimental Shadowblade program took it to a whole new level.

Two figures moving away from him, shields fully engaged with massed fire from the other side.  Dead.

Three more attempting to flank the main force.  Subtle, heads down, unseen.  Fling a grenade, watch it arch, feather it a bare meter above their heads.  Siege Tank sights on the blast and the flare of shields, launches a mortar.  Dead.

An aerial assault craft screaming in from behind.  Judge its altitude, velocity.  Launch a flurry of flechettes straight up, let the craft's velocity amplify the impact to the forward viewport.  Dead.

Motion to his right, a grim-faced human with weapon drawn.  De-

No. 

Pinkerton. 

Wait. 

They made eye contact then, as Barton's chest heaved with adrenaline.  Both knew just how close the other man had come to death.  There was no recrimination there, just a quiet warning.  Barton realized that, had he returned without his escort, he would have been shot on sight.  That Pinkerton had been chosen for his escort because they trusted him to navigate a battlefield unscathed, that no circumstances but Barton's betrayal would prevent him from returning.

Pinkerton's eyes said, you almost died with me.

But we didn't.

You almost did it.

But I didn't.

You didn't.  Are you saying you're safe?

No.  Fair.  What are you going to do?

I haven't decided.

I accept that.

Well met.

Well met.

And they broke eye contact, returning to base with relative ease among mortars and energy blasts and, above it all, the gradual fading of the largest laser drill either of them were ever likely to see.  A different team would be sent to retrieve the now-freed artifact, and they'd likely have their own adventures and struggles over the next few minutes.  For their part, Barton and Pinky found an embrasure each and added their guns to the Howling Commandos' curtain of fire.  Barton found it almost relaxing, after the previous few minutes.  Working as small part of a bigger team carried significant burdens and hazards, but Barton revelled in the feeling of not being responsible for anything in particular even as he knew deep in his chest that feeling was a lie.

He could  _really_  use a cheeseburger....

\-------------------------

It was 1900 back on the Falcon, and the artifact was safely stowed away after a hasty but orderly withdrawal from Xil.  There were several casualties, but only two fatalities from a collapsed bunker.  Steve had presided over a short service for them somewhere on the crew deck.  Barton wasn't invited and hadn't pressed the issue.  Now he and the others, along with Pinky, were gathered back on the Falcon's bridge. 

Steve looked somber.  Barton watched for the subtle tells; there was sincere guilt but little real grief. The Captain pretended to feel bad, but mostly just felt bad for not feeling as bad as he thought he should.  With a moment of clarity, Barton realized Steve thought of the lost men as co-workers and followers he was responsible for, but not as family.  Phrased otherwise, Barton thought, the tribe community he had noticed among the crew circled around their leader, but did not quite include him.

Interesting.

And now the meeting was starting as Bruce and Tony, the final two expected members, arrived together but took separate positions around the central holotable.

Sam stood and started proceeding with a cordial "good evening all.  While my condolences go out regarding Sargent Hollis and Private Shelley, I'm pleased to announce that the operation succeeded on all objectives, with both the artifact and the terrazine safe on board.  You should know that Svartálfar forces pursued us through a translocation, but we lost them after getting the third artifact into containment.  Bruce, report on that front?"

"Well -- when the third piece was added? The ambient containment field spiked drastically.  I mean, it spiked when we put that second piece in, but there's some sort of feedback process between them, so the spike is exponential, not linear.  It's going to nearly triple each time we put one in - or not triple, but maybe 2.72 times, or very nearly 'e'.  Within error bars of it, at least.  Which is weird, I mean why 'e' right?"

Steve seemed to have figured out how this game is played.  Without any hesitation or hint of judgement, he asked, "so what does that mean in practical terms?"

"I guess it means holding them gets increasingly dangerous and expensive?  We're okay for now, but adding a fourth or fifth is going to put our power requirements high enough to matter, and I wouldn't put a sixth in there without plenty of time to make sure we don't blow a fuse, so to speak.  Past that we'd start seeing brownouts shipwide even running the reactor at full.  Hey Tony, how many of these things are there, anyway?"

"Six.  Mobius has been sitting on one for a little while, so we've had a chance to poke it and see what twitches.  Last I heard, thinking was they join together, do some muckitymuck with Asgardian and Hydra energies, but doesn't seem to affect humans much at all."

"Wait, don't affect humans much, or don't affect humans at all", asked Steve.

"Well, we managed to give a Ghost a headache once?  That might have been a coincidence though.  We'd already convinced him he'd developed telekinesis by mucking about with shaped magnetic fields and software to track his eye movements."

Sam pinched the bridge of his nose again.  "So you're saying the headache could have had more to do with proximity to a certain Mr Tony Stark than any alien artifact."

"Yeah, pretty much", Tony agreed wholeheartedly.  "Still went into the report though, under 'bears further investigation'.  Next we're going to use microwave lasers and convince him he can burn things with his mind."

"Anyway, on with the briefing", Sam soldiered on.   "Pinky, how did things go with the terrazine?"

"Straightforward.  Got about 90 mol, which doesn't sound much but would turn a pretty penny on the black market.  Given some unhurried time on another world like that, and we could make enough to cover our whole operation for the month."

"And our Spectre friend?"

As if on cue, the ansible chimed.

Sam pressed a few buttons on his terminal and scowled.  "We've got a highly encrypted call coming through for the bridge. Should I put it on?"

There was a new tension on the bridge.  Ansible communication was theoretically untraceable, with no way of telling what the receiver's position was, but rumor was that a few Ghosts had talents that made that far less true than it was supposed to be.   He'd never verified if it was true or not, but outlaw groups like the Howling Commandos quickly developed superstitions about answering certain types of incoming requests, and this would top any list. 

 Steve considered for a moment.  "Put it on.  Let's hear it."  Brave man.  Or just not superstitious.

Nat's face bloomed over the holotable, youthful as ever.  Either she had regular Antigerone treatment as part of her contract, or a side effect of her talent suppressed aging naturally.  She looked around and gave a smile that didn't remotely get near her eyes.  "Well well", she said, "the infamous Captain Steve Rogers.  My name is Natasha Romanoff, callsign Black Widow.  We should talk."

Barton could see the sudden tightening around Sam's eyes echoed in Steve's, and, more surprisingly, Tony's.  They knew that name, and knew what that meant. 

Steve refused to be intimidated.  "Now what would one of Pierce's pet Ghosts have to say to me?"

"Barton is lying to you."

Welp, there it was.

Steve's eyes flickered over to him - so much for the poker face.  Barton stepped around into the viewfield Nat would be able to see and looked at his old mentor in the eyes.  "Good to see you, Nat.  Radiant as ever."

"Can't say the same, Barton."  Can't say.  Interesting.  So she wants to say something different but is being closely monitored.  "Those years on the run haven't been kind.  Must be rough, constantly looking over your shoulder."

"Yeah, well, we'll see whose back needs watching."   May as well ham it up.

Nat let the bait lie though, and turned to the Captain.  "You should know, Barton and his friends are time bombs.  The project they were a part of was a failure, and seven of them have already gone on psychotic killing sprees.  We need to contain the remaining threat before more innocent blood is shed.  Help me on this, Steve."

Steve seemed unmoved.  "Even if I believe you, I'm not in the business of aiding government executions."

"No executions, I give my word", Nat said.  She meant it then; she promised lightly, but only gave her word when she meant it.  "We've got a special wing in the Raft set up, sedate and contain only.  Psychic talent's rare enough that we don't want to throw it away." 

Well that was interesting.  Barton figured the next steps in their little drama easily enough.  Putting his hand on Steve's shoulder and looking him in the eye, he said, "don't listen to her.  Help me bust the Spectres from the Raft, and we'll bring down Pierce together."

Nat's voice was cautioning as she said, "the Raft is full of psychopathic killers. Do you really want to release them into the galaxy?"

"I'm helping you against Pierce, and my friends will too.  She'll never be on your side.  I am."

"He's a psychopathic time bomb.  He'll be on your side right up until he puts a knife in your back."

"Enough." With one word, Steve brought an end to the banter.  "Thank you, Romanoff, for your consideration.  I'll take your warnings under advisement.  Is that all for the day?"

"For now.  Be seeing you."  She touched her thumb and forefinger in a circle around her eye, and cut the feed.

As Nat's holo faded, there was a moment of sombre silence that Tony gleefully tromped all over.  "Well that was fun," he said jovially.  "Anyone else get old-married-couple vibes from those two?  No?  Just me?  Barton, you sure you two never hooked up somewhere?  I mean, I heard she's like 70 or something, but those suits don't leave much to the imagination and let me tell you, if I didn't have Pepper I'd hit up that GILF."

Sam went into a coughing fit.  Bruce sighed an exasperated "Tony...."  Tony just smirked.

Steve caught Barton's eye and asked, "Is any of what she said true?"

Barton considered carefully.  Most of what Nat had said was true, in that both terrazine overdose and withdrawal could trigger dangerous and violent episodes.  But what she had said and what she was saying were different in ways that Barton wasn't certain he could impart on Steve.  Finally he looked up and said, "she's doing her job in sowing dissent.  The thought of the Howling Commandos and Spectres teaming up has someone in command spooked.  I guess they figured you'd be more moved by friendly advice than by threats."

"And what about the Raft?  Now that we've helped you once, do you expect us to take on the most heavily guarded prison in the sector?"

"Oh heck no.  That thing's full of psycopathic killers, didn't you hear?  Plus it's got 'honeypot' written all over it.  No way Nat drops a gem like that openly unless it's a trap."

Steve furrowed his brow as if something just wasn't processing, until Bruce chimed in, "oh, so you were just leading them on?"

"Yeah.  I mean if they're going to all the trouble of laying a trap, may as well make them thing we're taking them up on it.  Nat should know better than to think I'd fall for that, but I get the impression she's not overly impressed with her handlers right now."

"Think she might turn?"

"Sign up full time?  Naw.  Thing about Nat is, she's the best of the best, but she's also adaptable.  She'll work with whoever's winning; it's how she's stayed on top of the game so long.  She won't burn bridges with Pierce unless he's on his way out already.  And you can't buy her, because then nobody would trust her.  She'll happily work with you, but only after you've already won."

That seemed to satisfy all involved, at least for the time being.

 Steve turned to his agent.  "Pinkerton, we never heard your answer about Barton.  After all this, what do you say?  Is he safe"

Pinky looked over at Barton.  Barton nodded - whatever you're going to say, say it.

"He's dangerous.  Wouldn't want to be across the field from him, and there aren't many I'll say that about."

Steve's eyes were firm.  "So you don't trust him?"

Pinky looked to Barton and back to his captain.  "He's got baggage.  More than most.  But I'll sleep okay with him on the Falcon."

And that was that.  He was in.

\-------------------------

Barton did not sleep okay.  He spent the night fitfully, haunted by dreams of white masks with empty eyes staring at him accusingly.  Once he thought he saw Wanda and Pietro, on fire and screaming, as he ran towards them with water cupped in his hands but running through his fingers.  Waking, he knew these to be just dreams, manifestations of his own troubled unconscious rather than any psychic premonitions.  They still troubled him.

As he lay there, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling, drifting in the hazy half-consciousness of hypnopompia, he felt Wanda knocking on the back door of his mind.  The depths of her psychic ability were incredible, but this far away she could only have reached him through great effort, and only while he was falling asleep or just waking up.

"Hello", he thought, opening that door.

"Hello", she thought back, her Kel-Morian accent somehow even more pronounced in mind-speak.  "I felt your fear.  Bad dreams?"

"Yeah, just bad dreams.  I'm sorry it troubled you."

"No trouble.  Good to feel your life."

"Same.  I trust you two, I know you'll take care of eachother, but I worry."

"Of course you do, you're our dad."  The thought beamed with guileless joy at the thought.

He let his own feelings of love and affection seep back through the bond.

Some things didn't need words, even light-years apart.

He felt the contact fading as his mind woke up more fully.  "Before I go, I should tell you, I have the terrazine."

"Great to hear!  And send more paprika, we're almost out and the stores here are rubbish."

"You're not showing your face in stores, right?"

"Of course not.  Pietro does his little raids sometimes, but I make sure he's careful."

Amusement on the bond, from both sides.  In many ways Wanda was the more mature of the two, and looked after her 'little' brother even though he was a few minutes older than her.  Barton knew Pietro Maximoff's mighty psionic prowess made him a superlative shoplifter - having him lift some snacks or spices from a nearby store was like getting Babe Ruth to pinch-hit tyke's baseball, or getting Kyla Velassi to sing a gradeschool talent show.  He'd tried to get Pietro to stop, but sometimes the younger man needed an outlet, and it was safe enough in the grand scheme of things.

"Just make sure he's keeping it to once a week, tops.  Don't want anyone to think there's a crime wave-"

A sudden, overwhelming, emanation of dread over the mental bond, ancient and horrible, a creeping sensation cold as the heat death of the universe, empty as the starless sky, a path leading to the end of all things.

And it most assuredly wasn't coming from Wanda.

She felt it too.  "Something terrible.... near you... hide, papa, before - HE IS COME, ASSASSIN OF PROPHESY, LISTEN-"

And the bond was gone.

Barton stared up at the unfamiliar ceiling once more.

He really really _really_ needed a cheeseburger.


	5. Those that Defy Fate (Across that Wretched Field)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nick Fury discovers problems by being sufficiently paranoid.
> 
>  
> 
> This chapter contains references to Norse myth, the Rolling Stones, Princess Tutu, and Night's Dawn, among others.

It was shipboard night on the Falcon, and lights were set to low in the various hallways.  Activity on the ship never truly stopped, but it did slow down during the artificial nights.  The Falcon, like any living thing, needed periods of dormancy for maintenance, resupply, and preparation.  It slept while lockers and ammo bays were re-filled, batteries were re-charged, and systems re-calibrated.  In the shipboard morning it would be at its peak and ready for anything.  But for now it slept.

This suited the Vanir known to Terrans as Colonel Nicholas Joseph Fury just fine.  He sat in the darkness of Steve's cabin, patiently awaiting the Captain's return.

Blood quietly trickled down his sleeve and into the fabric of the chair.  The wound would leave a nasty scar, but it would hardly be his first scar.  He was lucky to have gotten away so easily.   And right now, some blood loss was the least of his problems.

Tangentially, he was aware of the presence four Terrans with minor magical gifts, only one with the training to use it effectively.  The mind-bond to a far more distant and rather more gifted Terran posed little danger, but he'd not survived this long by being incautious.  Fury severed that bond with a wisp of his own will.  Though his kind lacked the font of magical energy that practically defined their bretheren the Æsir, long study in the void between stars had given them their own, subtler, talents.  Mainly to do with concealment and prophesy.

Prophesy.

His fingers traced the outline of a Terran memory stick in his coat pocket.  The disguised Ihan Crystal was still there.  Good.

He did not, as a general rule, dislike prophesies any more than the next Vanir.  But this one was going to be the death of him. 

In more ways than one.

He sat, and he waited, as the doom of the universe crept ever nearer.

\--------------------------

In the Crystal was an image: an orphan world floating desolate and abandoned between the stars.  Thin atmosphere, low gravity, little light, no life.  Deep within, a cave.  On the wall of the cave, writing in sigils weathered by interstellar dust over millenia. 

With the image, knowledge: the name of the world, Vormir.  Created by the Titans even before they had uplifted the Firstborn, the Æsir.  A shrine meant to last not mere thousands but tens of millions of years, plucked from its orbit and set to drift in the great nothing, so that only those bound to the prophesy contained therein could find it.

The image was changing.  A hand reached forward, Fury's hand, the view from Fury's eyes.  The hand held a light, and the sigils were illuminated.  Figures were revealed, a ravenous Hydra on the left, an Æsir warrior on the right, war in the middle.  Above both, a towering shape, inscrutable in form, arm-like appendages stretched out to encircle  the smaller figures.

Fury's voice, hollow in the cavern.  "The Titans' two creations, warring in their absence.  Until the masters return.  But do they come to save... or to destroy...?"

But the sound of his voice in the cavern was wrong, the echo different.  Something had moved. 

The view turned, slowly.  There, a hydralisk undulating out of the shadows, headplate already folding open to reveal row upon row of urticating barb.  An awareness of three more, elsewhere in the room.

A thought appeared, an exclamation.  No others should be in this place!  But it was washed over with a flurry of motion and violence.  Four hydralisks fell in the rapid succession, barbs and claws striking at empty air while Fury carved his way through one after another.

No other attackers, but something wrong.  Another presence revealing itself.

The Winter Soldier.

All the brutality and hunger of the entire Swarm, distilled into a single form, standing in a room thick with power and dread. 

It spoke.  "I knew you'd find your way here eventually", it said, words laden with callous condescension.

Could a God condescend to a mortal?

Not a God, but an embodiment of wanton destruction.  A arch-demon incarnated upon Terran flesh.

He had to say something.  "You should not be here, Barnes.  This place was not meant for you."

But it seemed not to even hear him.  As if anything he could say was beneath its notice.  As if it spoke only to hear its words fill the air.  "Do you hear them, Fury? Whispering from the stars?"  It looked at him, then, its eyes blazing with power.  "The galaxy will burn with his coming." 

"Perhaps."  He advanced, then, circling, his seax blade hidden by his flowing cloak.  "But you will not live to see it." 

He struck at it.

He struck, but the sheer force of its will caught him, held him immobile in the air.  His muscles flexed, but there was nowhere to go.

"I don't wish to kill you, Fury," it said, its voice coming from planets away.  "You're not what I'm here for.  You're not my mission."

"What...."  He struggled for each syllable, breath failing to fill his lungs.  "What... is... your.... mission?"

"To face the end.  He comes.  And when he does, I shall embrace my destiny."

Spots in his vision.  One syllable left, that was all he could manage.  "Why?"

"I remember.  Being mortal.  Being human."  It tilted its head as if carefully dissecting something noxious.  "Worthless.  Full of pleasant illusions.  Truth.  Justice.  Hope."

The pressure on Fury's chest relaxed slightly as it threw him against the stone floor.  The thin air of Vormir burned its way down his throat.  A surge of euphoria as oxygen flooded back into his system.

It stood over him, its eyes far away.  "You feel it too, Fury.  I know you do.  I choke you, and you despair.  I release you, and you rejoice.  Cortisol.  Dopamine.  Serotonin."  It shook its head.  "Were you not Firstborn, I could assimilate you, rewrite your genome.  I could teach your brain to experience overwhelming joy every time you saw me.  I could weave the very strands of your being around mine.  Would that mean you loved me?"  It looked at him again, pain and confusion clouding the majesty within.

These eyes were even worse than the ones blazing with divine wrath.  Fury could not meet them.

"You know the answer as well as I.  'Vanity of vanities', saith the Preacher, 'vanity of vanities; all is vanity.'"

Then Fury's seax blade slashed out again, a Dvergar-forged dagger that could cut diamond.  But the Winter Soldier was moving too, reacting faster than anything driven by neuron and thought could possibly react.  A blur of motion, a sudden sick shudder of pain, and he was free and away, back against one of many stalagmites that covered the cavern's floor.  The Winter Soldier's chitinous left arm lay, severed and shriveling, on the cold stone.  But blood was flowing down his own arm, a deep wound near the tendons of his shoulder.  Limited use of the arm until it healed.

He looked at his foe.  It looked at him.  No rage or pain there.

Before his eyes, its arm regrew, muscle and tendon knitting themselves together.

The cold voice spoke to him again.  "Fate cannot be changed."

And it left.  Unhurriedly.  Unconcerned about turning its back on him.  He was beneath its notice once more.

He watched it go.  And when it was gone, he bandaged his wound.  "The prophecy is uncertain", he said, as if to convince himself.  Then, more firmly: "there is always hope, as long as there are heroes."

His eyes traced the sigils again, translating the Titan runes only with focused effort.

 _The Cycle shall draw to its end._  
_The Titans who forged the stars_  
_Will transcend their creation._  
_Yet, the Mad One shall remain_  
_Destined to cover the Void in shadow._  
_It begins with the Great Hungerer._  
_It ends in utter darkness._

\-------------------------

 While humanity was first learning to name the stars and their patterns, there was a war in heaven.

It was not the first war, nor would it be the last.  The Æsir, Firstborn of the Titans, had populated the stars as a shining beacon of civilization.  They spread through system after system, imparting light and order.  They were majestic but not perfect, and when their technology failed on exotic words, they adapted and diverged.  On a world of ice far from its sun they become Jötunn; on a world set adrift from its star they became Svartálfar; on a world where meteors rendered the surface uninhabitable they became Dvergar.  All the divergent strains of the Æsir were seen as corrupted, degenerate, and flawed, but were tolerated unless they caused trouble.  The Jötunn caused trouble, and were struck down.  The Svartálfar caused trouble, and fought back, but were driven back to where the light of Asgard could not reach.  The Dvergar, wisely, did not cause trouble and accepted Æsir supremacy, instead developing an honoured niche for themselves in fabrication and design as master Phase-Smiths.

And thus, for the most part, there was peace until the Great Heresy split the Æsir and the Vanir.

The Firstborn were gifted above all other races, both physically and magically.  Their magical energies permeated every device and tool they created and defined nearly every aspect of their society.  To be severed from that font of light was the greatest punishment the Æsir knew, greater even than death.  But to throw that all away, to give up voluntarily the source of the Æsir's glory?  This was the sacrifice that the great matriarch Kartar had asked for.  And this this was the tradition that Fury followed.

There had been a war, and bloodshed.  The deviant offshoots were not to blame for their misfortune, victims of their own impurity, but the Vanir were heretics.  They were hunted down and slaughtered wherever they could be found.  They soon became masters of hiding, of walking unseen, but it wasn't enough against the dedicated might of Asgard arrayed against them.  They would have been doomed had Freya not stood up to the wrathful Odin to prevent their utter annihilation, forever tarnishing her own reputation.  Though Odin would soon forgive her, Freya would never pass down a street without the word "Vanir" following behind her like a bad odor.

Freya had saved them, but they could never be welcome on Asgard.  They were banished, utterly and irrevocably.  They walked the dark places, the quiet places, the worlds of the lesser species who had never known Asgard's light.  They found barbarism and gentleness, cruelty and kindness, idiocy and simplicity.  And in the great darkness, in the dead worlds, they listened to the whispers of the shadows and found the fingerprints of the Titans.

They were still Firstborn, but they became something other than the Æsir. something other than Asgard's children.

On the terrible day that the Bifrost was torn asunder above Asgard and the Swarm devoured the birthplace of the Firstborn, it was not their home that had been lost.  It was not they that were hunted and hopeless and wandering.  But they remembered.

They remembered what it had felt like, and who had done that to them.  And they found that, on that day, they could find something greater than old grudges.

And so the Vanir welcomed the Æsir to the safety of their shadowed worlds, there to stand as one people once more, against the growing tide of darkness.  And then when the time was right, both the Æsir and Vanir together, along with trusted allies like Steve Rogers, struck back against the Swarm.  The Allfather himself sacrificed his life to strike the final blow against the Overmind.  Their homeland could not be saved, but it could be avenged.

\------------------------

In the Crystal, another image: the worldcity of Asgard, not as it was in its glory, but a view from the present, crumbling and corrupted.

With that image, knowledge: the hives here feral and unclaimed.  The mountainous carcass of the Overmind, long dead and rotting but still with traces of power in it.

Traces of power, and traces of prophecy.

Fury had swiftly concluded that the "Great Hungerer" in the prophesy was the Overmind, but this devoid of context was less than useless.  Prophesies were subtle things, but they had weight, they resisted change.  A prophesy may be self-fulfilling but would never be self-defeating; it would not be made if merely hearing it would prevent it from coming to pass, nor could they be undone merely by subverting some irrelevant detail.  Only by becoming a Locus, one who comprehends its structure and wills themselves to act upon it, could one hope to unravel a prophesy.  

The Vanir had a saying that prophesy told you not what do to, but where to look.  So Fury looked to the ruins of Asgard and the architect of its doom, for clues to preventing an even greater catastrophe.

The image clarified, focused.  Fury's custom fighter descended, its horseshoe-shaped hull hidden by the best stealth fields Firstborn technology had ever created.  It glided unseen past two of the outer spires, one still golden and pristine, the other partially collapsed under the cancerous weight of the fungus-like biomass covering most of the ruined city.  Past those, a crystalline structure that had once been one of the most prestigious academies was now home to a pack of chittering hydralings.  Another auditorium that had housed Asgard's plays and recitals now lay collapsed and riddled with pulsating egg sacs.  And looming over all, the corpse of the Great Defiler, obscene and putrid but still gargantuan on a scale that defied easy comprehension.  No single entity on any world had ever matched its sheer scale.

The craft settled down by one of the sprawling tendrils that extended from the Overmind's core, each tapering over kilometers from tubules the size of an ursadon bull down to spiderweb filaments.  Fury's boot were light on the ground, gravel over broken road but no sound from his footsteps.  A cluster of banelings passed by to the east, noxious acids roiling through their distended abdomens.  They didn't see him.   Good. Fury was a superb warrior by any standard, patient and skilled and lethal, but the Vanir did not value glorious combat like the Æsir.  Better to walk unseen and return safety.

He stepped over a puddle of unidentified fluids seeping from the nearby tendril, looking for a junction point where nerve fibers would be densest.  The base mechanisms of neurons and brain matter related only indirectly to the type of energy Terrans called psychic and the Firstborn knew as magic, but it was a reasonable assumption that even in an organism as massive and alien as the Overmind, any remnants of that energy would collect at these junction nodes.

Twice he had to hide from overlords, drifting masses of gas-bloated flesh and sensory organs whose eyes could pierce even the refined stealth fields of the Vanir over short enough range.  But where stealth fields failed, good old fashioned fieldcraft still worked and Fury was a past master.

Even so, it took several minutes to find a viable node.  He tapped into its energies and read their natures.

Pain.

Surprise.

Death.

Nothing useful, nothing that clarified the prophesy.  Was he chasing the wrong lead?  But after coming so far, persistence was warranted.  He moved further up, towards the mountainous core.

Above the next node perched a hydralisk, its faceplate crest displaying proudly.  A vestigial mating display from before the base species was assimilated into the Swarm?  No matter.  Fury slit its throat from behind and it slumped over bonelessly without alerting the rest.  Eventually the hivemind would send some drones or hydralings to investigate its sudden disappearance, but its response would be sluggish and unfocused.  There was time.

Again, he tapped into the energies of the node.

Again the raw sensation of death.

And... joy?

Why joy?  Unclear, but it carried a sense of subtle vindication. 

Sensations left in these decaying nodes might lose nuance, but not change their nature.  Anger, fury, and wrath might all blur together over the weight of years, or exhilaration and joyous expectation might become difficult to distinguish, but the general sense of it, the nature of the sensation, would not change.   Whatever else had occupied the Overmind's thoughts in its final moments, there was a happiness to them that defied obvious explanation.  Fury was on the right path.

At a third node, something new.  Trepidation, but also satisfaction.  A sense Fury knew well, of plans within plans, that would progress with or without further intervention.

Nothing for it then.  The nodes had told him all they could, that the Overmind had predicted its own defeat and was playing some larger game than simply consuming and subjugating all life.  No node could add to that.  But the cortex... the cortex may still maintain some coherent engrams, the specific thoughts occupying its consciousness at the time of death.  The Overmind's plans were alluded to but not described by the prophesy, and thus knowledge of those plans could be used to unravel it without paradox.  If there was to be a key to preventing the apocalypse, it lay here.

Fury climbed into the mountain of cancerous and rotting flesh, wincing as the strain re-opened the wound on his shoulder.

He'd be at the bottom of this soon enough.

\-------------------------------

While Rome's legions were busy subjugating the Mediterranean, a far greater conflict was looming in the heavens.

In the days that the Firstborn had been uplifted, the Titans had walked the skies openly, but those days soon passed.  None had seen a Titan in millennia, though the Æsir built shrines in their honour and the Vanir traced their footsteps through the stars.  They were Gods unto those who were as Gods themselves to the lesser races they sometimes visited, their technology and indeed their very nature just as incomprehensible. 

But they were not gone, nor could a being so primordial ever truly die.  And the Firstborn were never meant to rule the heavens alone.

The Æsir believed the Titans to be a benevolent force, bestowing their gifts only upon the races noble and worthy enough for their bounty.  But this Firstborn illusion was shattered when, after eons of growing complacency, the gifts of the Titans were given again.

Zerus was a jungle world, with no energy sources larger than a creature's own bodyheat, nothing that would draw a star traveller's eye.  But among its thousands and tens of thousands of native species grew an otherwise unremarkable parasitic worm with an unprecedented aptitude for storing, manipulating, and transmitting the Hox Genes that control a creature's body plan.  If a host with a tail was eaten by a new host without, the relevant Hox Genese may be transmitted and the new host may begin sprouting a tail.

At first the process was haphazard, inefficient.  Manipulating a living being's genome in vivo was almost invariably harmful, and the parasites hosts in these times were wracked by cancerous tumours and maladaptive changes.  The parasite itself wasted much of its own genetic potential in augmenting processes that did not aid its survival and success, and there the parasite should have ended, another unsuccessful adaptation among countless others.  

But the parasite didn't die out, and with rapid lateral transmission of genes came rapid evolution and an explosion of exotic forms, each driven to consume the genetic essence of its competitors and incorporate their strengths into itself.  Survival of the fittest in the extreme, as genomes were fragmented and reconstituted at absurd rates.  Sentience, language, and tenuous tribal behaviors developed and became ubiquitous, but all were absolutely subsurvient to the Law of the Jungle and the overwhelming hunger for new essence. 

Even at this time, Zerus from orbit was merely a jungle world like any other.  What use were walls when your skin became armour?  What use were weapons when your hands became claws?  No palatial dwellings, no monument except ones own body, no artificial lights, no radio, no ansible.  Nothing about the planet would attract the attention of a spacefaring race.  Yet a Titan found it.

Among the Firstborn, the Gift of the Titans gave immense physical, mental, and magical power.  When it came to a lowly parasitic worm on a primitive jungle world, it gave not strength, nor wisdom, nor magics.  What it gave was clarity, and precision.  Essence could be spun into sequences at will, genetic code parsed and manipulated with a watchmaker's eye for elegance and precision.  Wasted sequences discarded, forms adapted by design, obstacles overcome by planning.  Even the void between stars could not threaten it now.

The Overmind was born, and with it the Hydra Swarm took flight into the stars to consume and assimilate all that stood against it.

And consume it did, gathering essence from a hundred worlds as a living plague on the galaxy, until, as the primitive human Julius Caesar fought the Battle of Alesia on an obscure and insignificant planet, the Overmind encountered the only species whose essence it could not harvest: the Firstborn.

The Æsir confounded it.  They held such unparalleled purity of form, the true pinnacles of creation, but they could not be infested, their strength not harnessed into the Swarm's might  Nothing the Overmind could create could come close to matching an Æsir pound for pound.  No trick of strand or sequence could reproduce the raw power of their form. 

But it did not need to match when it could drown.  Billions of Hydra would descend upon a Firstborn world, and Asgard's many children quickly learned that their only recourse was to scour the planet of all life.  But for every infested world their Golden Armada would cleanse with holy light, Hydra would infest two more.

And so, as Brutus sank his dagger into Caesar's back, the greatest war in the history of the galaxy waged on far above them.

\--------------------

 In the crystal, a final image: Fury perched atop the central brain cavity of the Overmind, Secondborn of the Titans, three hundred meters of cartilage and bone and amorphous flesh, organic systems that had never before been needed in any other being in the cosmos, nor would ever be needed again.

With the image, a sensation: revulsion, trepidation, and determination.

There was no hesitation in Fury as he activated the link.

Prophesy unfolded.

A galaxy, half its stars snuffed out.

A nothingness, an emptiness, spreading hollow wings across all of creation.

One last beacon of light

A glorious last stand.

Ten million Æsir soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, rank after rank gleaming with polished gold.

Heading divisions of them were Frigga, Fandral, Hogun, Volstagg, Sif, Heimdall, Freya, Freyr, Tyr, Vidar, Bragi, Ve, Hel, Brunhilde, and others beyond mention.  On the flanks, the Vanir, Fury on the left and Kartar's daughter Sharran on the right.  In the air, the silvered Valkyrie wheeled on winged steed alongside the Golden Armada in glorious array across the sky.  And at their head, Thor, Asgard's favored son, now its greatest warrior-king, features weathered and aged over untold years, but strength undiminished.  In his right hand he held the legendary hammer Mjölnir.  In his left, Gungnir, the Spear of the Allfather, rang against the ground over and over, the heartbeat of all Firstborn, strong and clear and disciplined. 

Against them, the Mad Titan's abominations, the essence of the Firstborn and Secondborn fused together through methods beyond the ability or understanding of either.  And ahead of that impossible army was the Swarm, once-proud rulers of wide swathes of the galaxy, now mere mindless battle-thralls driven like animals before the main force of Hybrid monstrosities.

The assembled might of the Firstborn stared down the assembled throng of monsters and angels and demons, ready to lay down their lives, not for victory, but time.  Time to seal the Great Library, all the knowledge and wisdom the Firstborn had collected, preserved against all harm for those who might follow.  Time for the phase-smiths to set wards that would survive a supernova or a black hole and endure beyond a galaxy's demise.

The Swarm surged forward.  Behind them the Hybrid, towering entities of light and darkness and power, began their inexorable advance.

The Asgardians fought gloriously, each with the strength of ten, and Thor with the strength of a thousand.  As the Great Library was sealed, the archivists themselves joined the battle.  Artisans, poets, teachers, actors, shipwrights, children.  No hand that could hold a blade was empty, and any that could not guided the great machines of war.

Fandral and Volstagg fell, then Hogun.  Heimdall carved himself a bloody swath, but faltered amid the crushing horde; Lady Sif rallied to aid him but never arrived.  Fury watched his future self as he slew yet another ultralisk, and saw the moment of realization as a Hybrid's sevenfold eyes pierced his stealth field.  It tore him apart with Hydra claws and Æsir strength.

They fought gloriously, and they died gloriously.  One by one their lights were snuffed out and their energies returned to the dying universe.  Thor stood last, arms and will indomitable, a whirlwind of vengeance, striking down a foe for every single Firstborn fallen that day.  Hydra and Hybrid alike fell before him until at long last he, too, was drowned beneath the dark ocean.

The Last War was finished.

But not the dying.

The Swarm had serviced its purpose in full.  There were no more enemies to fight.  Their essence had already been assimilated into the Hybrid.  They were spent, and broken.  So they died, by the billions, without struggle or recognition.  Within minutes, the entire Swarm was reduced from a rampaging horde into so much raw biomass.  Asgard had forged for itself a tombstone that would survive the collapse of the galaxy, but not two stones would remain on the other to mark the passing of the Swarm.

Across that wretched field, a single voice laughed, deep and sonorous and heartless.  The Mad Titan had won, and there would never again be any to stand against him.

It was too much. 

Fury could bear no more. 

He severed the link.

For a long time, Fury simply sat on the ring of gristle and bone atop the Overmind.  

Prophesies had rules, but were amorphous things by nature.Even a vision as vivid and intricate would come to pass, even if details were subverted.  Fury could well die before the time the vision depicted, or Sif, or Hogun, but the rest would come to pass without them.  His fate was not sealed, but it was bound.  That, itself, was acceptable; no spymaster plans on living forever.  He could lay down his life without regret in the right cause.  He could accept that.

The rest....

He glowered at the neural cavity he'd been connected to.  That could not be how things ended.  He would not permit it!  And now he knew the shape of the doom he was to unravel.  He would need to plan carefully and set in motion events that could survive his death.  He would become a Locus.  "To those that accept fate, happiness," he whispered the ancient blessing to himself.  "And to those that defy fate, glory."

He was missing something.

The Overmind, too, had been bound to this vision and become a Locus against it.  It had cared little for the fate of the Firstborn, but the callous destruction of the Swarm had been similarly galling.

In that sensation of outrage and humiliation, Fury found traces of ancient and atrophied pain.

He was missing something important.

Fury, veteran spymaster though he was, needed time to decompress and analyse.  There were layers here, and much harm to be done in rushing to conclusions in matters of doom and destiny.  As a Vanir he was voluntarily cut off from the divinity of the Æsir, but every hidden detail of what he had experienced would be recorded in flawless detail by his neural implants.  He would have time to review it all later.

He stepped away from the rim, then stepped back.  One thing couldn't wait and a spy doesn't get to live to his age without learning to check their corners and their trail.  Half believing it was pointless, he opened the link again and scanned for other access.

Footprints were there in the Overmind's engrams.

Firstborn footprints.

Not his.

He probed the prophesy in his mind, and now that he knew what to look for he could see it clearly: there was another Locus, someone who'd seen this end and chosen to act upon it, whether for or against.  The Overmind itself had been a Locus, for a time, but it was long dead now.  This other Locus was alive and active.

And he could track it, straight into Terran space.

\-------------------------

The place of humanity in the cosmos has always been a rather contentious question.  The Asgardians have encountered thousands of tool-using cultures that could weakly be described as "civilized", and had catalogued several hundred who'd reached the stage of encoding information directly in electromagnetic transmissions.  The galaxy is a rather large place and humanity was hardly the first, or even the tenth, to step into the stars.  When Asgard's Golden Armada entered orbit over the human world of New Bronx to eradicate the Hydra infestation there, humanity had not even warranted a greeting or apology.  They were a Lesser Race, untouched by the Gift of the Titans, manifestly unremarkable in the grand scheme of things, and were thus worthy only of a degree of pity as the Asgardian solar lances killed them by the millions along with the Hydra.

Hydra Cerebrates, for their part, initially considered humans as little more than an inefficient conglomeration of genetic essence, good for little other than durability and endurance.  Their hox genes bore so little promise over what dozens of other species could provide, and were so costly in maturation times, that not a single gene was salvaged for use elsewhere.  They were worth only the crudest genetic patchwork, slaving dead and dying human bodies into mindless automatons as a short term effort until their biomass could be properly reclaimed for more useful constructions.  To the Hydra as to the Asgardians, at first glance humanity seemed as though they'd barely be worth a footnote in the annals of this sector, a pervasive but forgettable indigenous species among many others, to be ignored or exterminated at their convenience.

Yet humans had accomplished something none of the similar races had ever come close to managing.  They'd been able to compete with the two Titanborn races and hold their own.

Humanity's journey to the stars was an unsteady one to begin with.  Many species tear themselves apart in the period following discovery of radio communication, and humanity teetered on that precipice several times in the following two centuries.  Politicians whose power derived from fear and hatred pushed matters to the brink more than once, and the divisions these policies made distracted from a growing environmental crisis.  Though they had cities on Mars and Europa, by the time interstellar colonization became possible Earth was barely habitable and fading fast.  The first colony ships to leave the solar system were full of inmates, the product of a penal system gone mad and overflowing with bodies nobody wanted.  If they survived, others would follow; if they died, nobody would much care.

Instead, they went missing.  The colony ships, overburdened and under-supplied and built by the lowest bidders, wandered far off course and landed on a trio of planets a thousand lightyears from home, in what was then known as the Koprulu Sector.

These humans brought with them all the worst of their homeworld - the violence, the senseless greed, the bigotry, the callous disregard for others.  But they also brought the best.  With ingenuity, determination, and an almost uncanny ability to overcome the insurmountable, they recovered and flourished.

From the ruins of the three defective colony ships, they leapfrogged their way back to interstellar travel within two generations, and began their own colony projects by the third.  Humanity as a race never attained enlightenment or nobility, not in the Sol system and not in Koprulu.  They never became much more than neurotic primates with power tools, but freed from the ecological and economic baggage of their prior shortsightedness they thrived, and grew, and expanded across dozens of systems.  By the time the Titanborn races brought their great war to human space, Koprulu's human presence had footholds in almost a hundred worlds.  And while clearly outmatched on both sides, humanity fought back and managed to nonetheless win significant victories and shape events in the sector far beyond all expectations except their own.

There have been many theories for humanity's success, from their creativity to their intelligence to their willpower, but the simple truth is that other mortal races have possessed those traits in equal measure and failed.  There is no one right answer, but perhaps the simplest explanation is that humans have the rare balance of enough idiocy to attempt things clearly outside their capabilities, and enough determination and creativity to occasionally succeed anyway.  Humans, with alarming frequency, succeed at tasks a more rational race would not even attempt and which a less rational race would not be capable of.  They are the only spacefaring race to think that building something while intoxicated might possibly be a good idea, and they are the only ones for whom it might occasionally produce worthwhile results.

More subtle than that is the matter of élan.  More than any other spacefaring race, humans suffer diseases of the spirit - depression, anxiety, ennui, heartache, loneliness, homesickness.  But their spirit also buoys them in equal measure, pushing them beyond their limits in moments of desperation or exaltation.  The same weakness of spirit that may cause a human to die from lack of affection can also drive them to superhuman levels when circumstances are right.

Fortified with these two traits, and with a far more mundane knack for the pragmatics of warfare, humans have turned simple chemical and magnetic propellant weaponry upon those wielding the magic and strength of gods, and upon the pinnacles of adaptation and assimilation, and held their own.  And though they were still subject to all the sins and evils that were their birthright, there were always some among them striving to be better, and do better.

\-------------------------

Fury's craft passed silently rimward into United Planets space.  An opalescent nebula shimmered subtly as a new star gradually coalesced from the remains of an ancient supernova, but he paid it no mind.  It wasn't what he was here for.

Another Locus could mean any number of things.  At best, though, it was an inconvenience, someone to coordinate with, negotiate with.  Fury detested red tape.  He gave orders, he acted, but he wasn't what anyone would call a team player.  And two Loci acting on the same prophesy without coordination could tie it into knots of Gordian proportions.  A Locus always had agency with regards to their prophesy, and attempts to manipulate them as a pawn of one's own plans only ever succeeded by coincidence.  Each Locus will almost inevitably alter the fabric of the prophesy by their own choices, their own actions or deliberate inactions, not those foisted upon them by others.  It was one of the key reasons not to become one lightly.  No method of preventing this had ever been found short of murder.  

Murder, at least, was always on the table.  If the Locus was not someone Fury could work with, he could always remove them from the equation entirely.

He slipped between a trio of Terran helicarriers engaged in mock battle maneuvers, angling for clean broadsides in open space while denying them to the others.  None noticed his cloaked craft as he passed on his way to the fully industrialized world below, a bright sphere of tiled city and farmland identified on his Terran star charts as New Oakland, proudly self-styled as the first successful "planned world".  Fury immediately thought of his birthplace of Vanaheim, founded thousands of years prior, and even it was not the first planned world of the children of Asgard.  But a heavy dose of provincialism was to be expected with any of the mortal races, and humans more so than most.

The Vanir, of course, were mortals but of an immortal race.  Kartar had believed this duality of experience would give them a breadth of perspective that the Æsir, in all their prideful glory, lacked.  Fury sometimes wondered if part of that breadth of perspective meant acknowledging the subtle provincialisms of Kartar's own teachings.  Nobody was truly enlightened, even the great matriarch herself.  But the effort was worthwhile regardless.

The facility he traced the Locus to was a gleaming Wakandan enclave of steel and glass spread across dozens of modular buildings and bristling with security fences, biometric terminals, and armed guards.  Fury set his craft to hover invisibly an easy four meters over the largest building and quietly translocated himself inside.

Fury entered the antiseptic hallway with nothing to mark his entry except the barest scent of blood from the wound in his shoulder, and a slight puff of displaced air.  A passing janitor felt the unexpected breeze on her neck and turned, but saw nothing and moved on with her job polishing the handrail by the stairs.

A cheerful voice came over the intercom, "Nicholas Fury to conference room 404.  That's Nicholas J. Fury to conference room 404."  Fury glared at it, as if the sheer weight of his monumental disapproval would change what had just happened, as if daring it to aggravate him again.

The intercom was stubbornly impassive, but offered no further affront.

He went to the room. 

An ancient Terran proverb about cats and curiosity passed through his head, but he knocked on the door anyway.  The temperature in the hall dropped a few degrees as the door swung open to reveal a lavish Terran office with extravagant art on the walls, several well-stuffed leather chairs, and a massive lalondwood desk.

Behidn the desk was a smiling man with predatory eyes, an expertly-tailored suit of black and green, and glossy hair swept outward just about the shoulder.

Fury knew him.

"Loki," he said.  It wasn't a question.

The man behind the desk grinned.  There were a few too many teeth for a Terran, and they were ever so slightly too sharp.  A deliberate touch, perhaps, from the galaxy's premier illusionist. "Fury.  I'm glad you made it."  Loki gestured, and the door swung shut again.  "I must say, I'm a little disappointed.  Judging from your reputation I half expected you to appear in a corner dressed in a cape and cowl."

"Cut the bull, Loki.  Tyr still wants you in front of the Thing regarding the incident with Lady Sif.  You don't belong here."

"Oh, but I'm just getting started.  My work here is far from finished, and these Terrans are fascinating little creatures.  I've half a mind to keep a few as pets when I move on from this charade, but that'll be some time yet."

Fury stepped forward with violence in his eyes, but Loki raised a manicured hand.  "Easy there.  I didn't ask you here for a fight.  In fact, I wanted to give you something.  Something that, I think you'll find, you'll be glad you had."

Fury's eyebrows communicated a level of skepticism that bordered on the deliberately insulting.

"Come now", Loki beamed.  "You've seen the Overmind's vision same as I have, and resolved yourself to become a 'locus', or 'hero', or whatever you call it, in order to stop Thanos.  Well, I happen to rather enjoy living in this universe too.  So you see, we're both on the same side, aren't we?"

"Why do I have the feeling that's not quite the case?"

"Because you're not as moronic as your fake eyepatch makes you look, Fury.  You'd hardly believe me if I told you I didn't have my own game here."  The grinning Jötunn leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers.  "But what's puzzling you, is the nature of my game.  So go ahead, ask me anything.  If I like the question, I might even tell you the truth."

Fury detested this.  Following Loki's lead never ended well for anyone, but the man was slipperier than a pocketful of quicksilver.  Going up against the Winter Soldier in all his power had been worthwhile but foolish; attacking this Jötunn head-on in his home territory was pointless humiliation or suicide.

He ground his teeth. 

""What's your plan to unravel the prophesy then?"

"Oh, my dear Fury, three steps behind as always.  I won't tell you my plans, but I'll give you a hint: the prophesy already has a hole poked in it.  Shall we say, a Winter-Soldier-sized hole."

Fury's eyes flew wide.  The atrophied pain in the Overmind's feelings of humiliation - it had not just been bound to prophesy, but within its own mind!  Formed with thought and reason, but not free will, it had screamed and raged within the prison of its own mind until it had found a way to subvert its own programming.  It had taken a psionically-gifted Terran to be its weapon in the pre-ordained war against the Firstborn, but also as its heir to lead the Swarm away from the Mad Titan's path if it should be slain.  Without Thanos having total control of the Swarm's hivemind, the future in the vision began to fall apart.  The Overmind had set in motion a plan that not only could survive its death, but depended on it, without regard to how that death happened. 

So there was a flaw in the fabric of the prophesy.  But that did not mean it was over that easily.  The Winter Soldier that Fury had met on Vormir was not yet someone who could save the Swarm from Thanos.  And if he were to be killed or lose control of the Swarm, the prophesy would mend itself entirely.

As it currently stood, the destiny of the entire galaxy swung on the mental and physical well-being of James Buchanan Barnes.

The same James Buchanan Barnes who, less than a solar cycle ago, had waxed melancholic to him about the impossibility of love and fundamental hopelessness of existence.

Well, shit.

Fury glared at Loki.  The bastard was enjoying this, seeing the pieces fall together in his head.  Loki had guessed or known exactly how far Fury's logic had taken him, and exactly what conclusions he'd draw from that one little hint. 

He couldn't let Loki keep playing him like this.  He needed a change of topic that might even the playing field.  Shake things up, get Loki off balance or he wasn't going to get anywhere.  And if Loki had a weak spot anywhere, it was his brother.  Pushing aside the warning bells in his mind telling him this was a bad plan, Fury clasped his hands behind his back, looked Loki in the eye, and said, "What do you want me tell Thor and his court about you, next time I see them?

Loki's face instantly darkened.  "Tell them I'm conquering mortal worlds as a God-King.  Tell them I'm breeding myself with farm animals.  I care not.  All Asgard ever gave me was heartache and disrespect. Forever a prince in a King's shadow. And let me tell you something; I'm glad to see what's happened to that world."  The Jötunn's eyes flashed with rage and frost began tinting the windows.  "Now that they've given themselves heart and soul to that  _paladin_ , the whole wretched breed of Æsir can rot for all I care.  I'm done with them!"

Every nerve in Fury's body was vibrating.  That had definitely been the wrong button to press, and he might not live to regret it.  The air around Loki reeked of violence.  Knees bent, shoulders in, prepare for anything.

But the moment passed, and Loki quirked an almost apologetic smile.  "You'll have to pardon me, that was... ungracious.  To answer your question properly, tell them I'm finding amusement for myself far from their worlds, and for the time being we're all better off leaving it that way.  If that changes, I know how to find them."

Fury thought it best not to press the subject of Asgard any more.  But there was something else that was niggling at him.  "You said you wanted to give me something.  What was it?"

"Ah!"  Loki sat back up in his chair and steepled his fingers again.  "I'm glad you asked.  How'd you like an Infinity Stone?"

\--------------------

The door to Steve Rogers' cabin slid open and the Captain stepped through carefully, shield up and gun in hand.  Fury stayed in the chair and waited for Cap to find him.  He'd worked with the Terran before, more than once.  They'd both been on Char when the Winter Soldier had emerged from his Chrysalis, and they'd both followed Thor and Odin to the corrupted Asgard in the attack on the Overmind.  He trusted the man's judgement, and his reflexes, but there was no point tempting fate.

Cap rounded the corner and their eyes met.  The Terran's posture relaxed instantly as a moment of understanding passed between them.  They had both been through hell together, almost literally.  They were both heretics among their own people, Cap for rebelling against his government and Fury for being a Vanir and, more than that, an omen of ill fate.  He did not spend much time with the other Firstborn, and his few appearances usually presaged some cataclysm or other.  But they both knew the other to be honourable, trustworthy, and competent.

"Fury", the Terran said.  It wasn't a question.  There was a note of caution there; he know Fury wouldn't have come unless the Vanir wanted something.  Neither of them were that sort of friend.

Fury acknowledged his concern without breaking eye contact.  "Captain Steve Rogers.  It's good to see you again", he said, and his eyes flickered towards the door.

Cap took the hint and triggered the door to slide shut.

When the door was closed and he indicated the room was secure, Fury gave him a serious look.  "So.  What do you want first, the good news or the bad news?"

"Let's start with the good news."

"All hope for the galaxy is not yet entirely lost."

They watched eachother for a moment, neither one blinking. Eventually Cap sat down.

"Maybe you should start with the bad news."

Fury walked him through the basics: the Overmind's apocalyptic vision, its sacrifice of its life to open a ray of hope, and that the only path to victory over Thanos lay in the Winter Soldier leading the Swarm against him.

Cap sat very still.

When Fury was finished his summary, he left the memory stick with its embedded Ihan Crystal on the table.  In it was a recording of his sensations and experiences on Vormir, his exploration of Asgard's corrupted ruins, and the Overmind's vision.  He had carefully edited out any reference to the other Locus, everything that had occurred after stepping away from the Overmind's peak the first time.  Fury was a firm believer in compartmentalization.  The Terran did not need to know about Loki, not until there was something to be done about him.

Not for the first time since leaving New Oakland, Fury regretted turning down Loki's offer of the Stone.  The Infinity Stones were not the nigh-omnipotent weapons of mass destruction of rumor, but as tools of the Titans they operated on a level beyond the deepest understanding of the Firstborn.  The Svartálfar worshiped them, the Dvergar loathed them, and the Æsir distrusted them.  They could absorb energy with phenomenal ease, and could draw the life right out of any unshielded Firstborn foolish enough to stray too close.  Fury could feel the unearthly pull of three of these Stones tugging faintly on his soul through multiple bulkheads and layers of shielding, and would rather not get much closer without the services of a qualified Phase-Smith to properly ward them.

He left the Terran with a final warning that accessing the memory stick, besides being troubling in the extreme, may have significant destiny-related implications.  Captain Rogers replied that he was rather more of a Free Will fellow.

"Where angels fear to tread," Fury rejoined as he stood to shake the Captain's hand and move on to his next destination.  "Where angels fear to tread."  


 

 


	6. Spider's Web (A Greater Hazard): part 1 of 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sam solves problems by being organized.

_...Memorial unveiled on Tarsonis..._   
_...Hydra inflict heavy casualties on United Forces..._   
_...Tyrador defenses criticized for lack of readiness..._   
_...New schools curriculum adds 'alien awareness'..._   
_...Kyla Velassi attending premier for her latest holo..._   
_...This is UPN news with Mitchel Ellison..._

"Emperor, much has been written in regards to the tragic fall of Tarsonis. Urich's investigative documentary 'Imperial Dawn' even claims that you brought down the Confederate system by assuring Tarsonis' fall."

"I've heard these conspiracy theories before. But the fact remains the Hydra invaded Tarsonis en masse and no force in the universe could have stopped their onslaught. It was a very... terrible day."

"Urich's film highlights the seeming convenience of the aliens annihilating a corrupt government that you yourself spent a lifetime trying to overthrow."

"Millions died that day, and you speak to me of convenience? Yes, I strove against the evils of the Old Confederacy, but never with the object of personal gain! When I was called upon to take up the heavy burden of leadership I did so only to ensure our continuing survival as a species."

"Striking words from the Emperor himself.  Up next, Hydralings allergic to lemon juice: old wives' tale, or new super-weapon in the fight for humanity?"

\---------------------------

Sam did not particularly like or trust Tony.  At first he hadn't even slightly liked or trusted him, so perhaps this was a sign the gregarious fellow was growing on him.  Growing on him like a fungus, or a bad smell you just can't shake, he thought.  But when the Captain said to drop the issue and accept him, well, that was it.

Still, there were times the man made every nerve in Sam's body go off like he'd just found a Hydraling under his bed.  This was one of those times.

"This", Tony said, "is Tyrador.  One of the first planned worlds in United space, and pretty much snarfhocker central since Tarsonis went belly-up, but also where Pepper grew up back in the day so I'll take it kindly if nobody but me badmouths it too much.  Somewhat less importantly, it also has Mobius's main research campus where they've been holding that artifact.  And a major Hydra strike force just wormholed themselves all up in its business."

On reflection, it wasn't that Sam felt Tony was lying to them, just that he was being strategic with the truth. Tony was being deliberately flippant, but wore more tension under the surface than usual. Some dangerous game was unfolding behind the scenes, and Tony was at the heart of it.

It was Steve who cut in though. "Wait, you said they took a wormhole in?"

"Yup.  Giant negative space wedgie right up there on the Lagrange-1 point.   The local reports have their own name for it, but on the streets they're calling it the Devil's Anus, and let me tell you, I've seen pictures, it's not far off.  Whole Swarm pouring out like the morning after too much bad Mexican."

"You... uh, you've seen pictures of Satan's anus?"

"Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to, Bruce.  But I clearly meant pictures of the wormhole.  The rest of you guys got that, right?  Right?"

"So what's all this about wormholes", interjected Barton.  "Hydra aren't really my specialty, but don't they just... fly to where they're going?"

Steve clarified, "usually yes.  But it's happened before.  We know Zola opened a wormhole during the destruction of Asgard.  Thor mentioned some of the largest Hydra creatures doing something like our translocations, but he thought only the Zola hivemind could 'tear open the Bifrost', as he put it.  Apparently the Winter Soldier can too.  Meaning he's more powerful than we thought, and that he's after the artifact Mobius was holding— may have already got it."

There was a dangerous edge to Steve's voice.  Sam had been worried about his friend's mental wellbeing for a while now, and while his Captain put on a brave face and played the stoic leader well, Sam was acutely aware of just how close to the ragged edge he really was.  But there was only so much you could do for someone who refused to let anyone in.  Steve seemed to have already decided how all this was going to end, and was simply playing out his hand to get there, slowly and surely.  And whatever that end was, Sam was pretty sure he wouldn't like it, and there was precious all he could do to prevent it.

But that didn't mean they were lost yet, and a thought occurred to him.  "Hold on, I'm going to access a remote feed... got it."  He checked the data scrolling through his terminal before explaining to the group, "the Falcon's still tied into the defence net of most core worlds.  When they blacklisted our authorizations, we were still left with read-only access."

With a few keystrokes he brought up a holo of New Oakland.  With a few more, he highlighted the wormhole, known Hydra locations, and the Mobius facility.  The invasion was still in its early stages, with the floor of Hydra pouring through the wormhole only beginning to reach the surface now.  The New Oakland orbital defences were slowing them down considerably, but the sheer size of the attacking forces was overwhelming it.  Still, there was already clear evidence of evacuation efforts, even if many of the available craft couldn't escape the system entirely without help.  And, as if by some stroke of chance, the wormhole was on the complete opposite side of the planet from Mobius.

There was a moment of silence around the room.

"Well, that's convenient", said Bruce.

Tony gave him a sharp look. "Convenient for somebody", he replied pointedly.

"Convenient for us", retorted Steve, "and for anyone we can help get out of the system."

Barton raised his hand.  "I hate to be a killjoy, but aren't we wanted criminals?  Jumping in the middle of a firefight where both sides want us dead sounds like poor life choices."

"Sam, how dangerous would it be to show our faces there?" 

By the tone of Steve's voice, Sam got the impression he was going to order the translocation anyway, but it was a fair question.  He took a moment to think about it.  The main problem was the IFF codes that help targeting computers sort hostiles from friendlies.  Any United craft with a gun would identify them as hostile as soon as they got in range.  Their silhouette matched common United designs and disabling their IFF entirely might help limit the range at which they'd be shot at automatically, but they still wouldn't be able to break orbit without a fight.  Still, a translocation at suitable distance from the planet should be safe enough, and at worst they could simply leave again.

"We can give the system a visit without too much risk.  No guarantees we'll be able to do much once we're there."

Steve's eyes were firm.  "Then let's shake some dust."

\---------------------------  
  
_...Holo-board initiative suspended..._  
_...Howling Commandos quiet..._  
_...Hydra 'not attempting conquest' say analysts..._  
...Kyla Velassi detained for possessing controlled substances...  
...Karen Page interviews Crown Princess Shuri... _  
__...This is UNN with Mitchel Ellison..._

"We have a very special guest today... Crown Princess Shuri of the Wakandan Protectorate! Thank you so much for joining us, Highness!"  
"Thank you Karen, it's wonderful to be here."  
"Let me get right to the question on everyone's mind -- is there anyone special in your life right now?"  
"Truth be told, Karen, I have had a crush on you for many years."  
"Oh, stop!"  
"But in all seriousness, with the Hydra invasion, there's little time for such things. I've been studying military tactics with General Rhodes, and whatever spare time I have is devoted to statecraft.  It's my goal to be the best queen our people could ask for. When the time comes, of course."

\---------------------------

 "Thank the stars you're here here", said the grinning Dr Laufeyson on the viewport.  "I don't know what we'd have done.  We've been able to get most of our personnel off-world, but the artifact and several years of research notes are still down there.  Letting the Swarm get hold of all that... well, let's just say it's not recommended."  There was a sly smirk to the head researcher's voice.  Sam chalked it up to nerves.  He'd volunteered in Veteran's Affairs before signing on to Steve's rebellion, and knew that everyone reacted to shock differently.  He'd seen battle-hardened soldiers descend into bubbling hysteria before, and even if a civilian with good enough nerves was able to surpress the reaction, they might present very differently than the common holodrama depictions would suggest.  People facing down an apocalypse may laugh, cry, shout, giggle, or shut down entirely.  Sam had no grounds to judge a man for how he coped with the horror around him, as long as he held it together long enough to get the job done.

"We'll do our best, Doctor.  Is there anything our ground team should know to make their job easier?"

"More than either of us has patience for, I assure you."  There was that unearthly grin again.  Sam tried to be charitable and not let it unnerve him.  "But the internal security doors are disabled and the mainframe is set to export the most critical data as soon as a suitable storage device is connected in.  Fully encrypted, of course.  And we obviously have redundant backups, so the quickest way to ensure the data doesn't fall into Hydra hands is simply to scuttle the building.  I'm sending over blueprints and a temporary IFF code now.  We wouldn't want the local security net flagging you as a notorious outlaw, now would we?"

 Sam felt his eyebrows rising.  Mobius must have had extremely thorough disaster planning; it beggared imagination that they'd thrown all this together since the wormhole opened.  Still...

"Appreciated, but it'll take more time than we have to reconfigure the IFF codes for the Falcon..."

The researcher cut him off.  "Oh, I think you'll find they're already confirgured.  You hardly expected us to be ignorant of the company our associate Tony keeps, did you?  But time, as you say, is slipping through your fingers.  You'd best be about it."

It was official, Sam had found someone who bothered him even more than Tony did.  He severed the connection without giving Dr Laufeyson the courtesy of a goodbye, trauma response or no.  He gave the IFF config a once-over, but the head researcher had been right.  There wasn't time.  In the end, he had to patch it into the system and hope for the best.

It worked, insofar as nobody shot at them as they approached low orbit.  Most of the fighting was centred on the other side of the planet, and the whole world was haloed by the false corona of continuous explosions and energy discharges.  The planetary defence net was getting pushed back in orbit, but the situation was worse on the ground.  Even from orbit, Sam could see power fail for another district as local infrastructure sustained too much damage from the Hydra forces spreading like cancer across its surface.  He was glad his Captain was in the launch bays, getting the ground team prepped.  Steve was not blind to the horrors around them, but Sam knew it ate at him every time he had to see it happen.  Best to let Cap focus on the ground mission.  The decision had already been made, the die cast, and it was Sam's job to see it through from orbit as best he could.

Sam held the bridge as the Falcon descended towards the Wakandan enclave that the Mobius facilities were attached to.  The Wakanda Protectorate had several such enclaves, doubling as embassies and outreach centres, working with local researchers and scientists to adapt advanced Wakandan robotics technologies to solve local problems and advance human knowledge in ways that, theoretically, would benefit everyone.  The reality was rarely quite so idealistic, but it was still considered a great honour to be invited in, an honour that was about to be shared with a platoon of fully-armoured Howling Comandoes.

There was a limit to how closely Sam could manoeuvre the Falcon without interfering with the ongoing evacuation, but drop pods and medivacs could cover the remaining distance, along with a Hercules troop transport Tony had dug out of the fabsim and assured them was "99.8% guaranteed not to turn the payload into so much strawberry jam if it banks too sharply."  Sam had several problems with that statement, not least of which was referring to the brave men and women volunteering for the op as "payload", but Bruce had assured them the designs were good and he'd feel comfortable riding in it, "if it wasn't, y'know, headed to a world minutes away from being consumed by Hydra".

So Sam ordered the drop, with a private memo to the Hercules pilot to keep the ride as smooth as possible.  With plating that heavy, it shouldn't matter much if it took some extra fire.  Ideally, of course, it wouldn't take any.  It was possible to complete an op without getting shot at, wasn't it?  Prior experience suggested otherwise, but there was a first for everything, right?

Another sector winked out.  Another million civilians dead or dying.  Or infested.  There were worse things than death these days.

Sam paced.  Amid the growing flurry of reports from the planetary defence net and the Howling Commando ground team, there was precious little for him to do.  His crew knew their jobs well.  The ground team had the best soldier of his generation to lead them.  There were no decisions to be made, no planning or logistics to be arranged until they'd extricated themselves from New Oakland, and the astrogation for that jump was already keyed and updating in real-time.  So he paced.

Another sector winked out.  Wherever the front lines of the battle lay, they were somewhere past there.  Less than a minute later, yet another sector's lights were extinguished, this one in a line with the first towards the Wakandan enclave.  Hydra knew what they were after, and were passing up less defended zones along their path to get there as quickly as possible.  Sam's hand slapped the ansible band for Steve's suit.  "I hope you brought your appetite because it's about to get spicy down there." 

What had he just said,  something about appetite?  Nerves must be getting to him too.  He hit the control again.  "Nevermind that last comm, but Hydra will be at your position shortly." 

Steve's voice on the return band had a grin written all over it.  "I copy you, Sam.  We'll be home safe soon enough."

Sam's face flushed.  The rest of the bridge crew were staring at him, he was sure.  He pointedly avoided their eyes while reports from the extraction efforts echoes through their systems.  Cap held the read guard long enough for Dum-Dum to set the demolition charges, and then the team was airborne as the facility detonated behind them.

All this was pieced together from the comms of the various Commandos in the ground team.  It was only when the Hercules transport was halfway back to the Falcon that Sam realized that, since his brief comm, Cap's frequency had been strangely silent.

Sam resolved to ask him about it later, even if he might not like the answers.

\---------------------------

_...Tyrador tsunami caused by illegal waste dumping, officials reveal..._   
_...General Martin takes early retirement..._   
_...Recent SAT1 reports 'no cause for alarm' say palace advisors..._   
_...Kyla Velassi breaks down on stand. Velassi: I'm the victim!..._   
_...This is UPN with Mitchell Ellison..._

"This is Mitchell Ellison, live from UPN. Tonight, the Hydra invasion: the Battle So Far.  With me on Korhal is Karen Page."  
"Good to be back, Mitchell."  
"The United Planets are holding firm under Hydra aggression. Our industrial complex has stepped up production on all fronts, enlistment rates have risen within the penal system, and the Marine Corps is ready to get in the fight. The Hydra won't know what hit them!"  
"Mitchell, has there been any word on when we start pushing the aliens back?"  
"Karen, if I revealed that, I'd be giving away vital Dominion secrets."  
"You think the Hydra watch our broadcast?"  
"I know they do, Karen. I know they do."  
"Well, you heard it here first, folks. This is Karen Page for UPN."

\---------------------------

The return of the ground team was marked by the same organized chaos of countless other mass extractions, and as usual it was up to Sam to ride herd on it.  As a general principal everyone knew where to go and what to do, but passions always ran hot at these moments, with all of the collected stress and expectation and fear leading up to the mission now pouring out as an emulsion of exhilaration and mourning as the situation dictated.  On this day, the joy of returning alive from a successful mission combined with the heartbreak still unfolding below, with neither diluting the other, and the results were just as unpredictable as always.

Sam had found long ago that discipline was at its most lax right after the troops felt their mission was over, and the best thing he could do at these times was to keep that sense of purpose and control going a little bit longer, until they had begun to disperse and could be dealt with as individuals.  Individuals were always easier than crowds.  So he barked orders, rallied stragglers, and generally told people to do what they were already doing just better and faster.  As gear was stripped and stowed and the hanger bay gradually emptied, he looked around for his Captain but found only his locker, armour and gaussrifle ready for maintenance, and his signature shield hanging up front with a fresh scratch in the old paint.  Sam had been trying for years to get it repainted, but Steve always declined.  At least the body of the shield was in good condition, its integrity still undamaged.  During the First War, an Asgardian they'd worked with named Fury had told them that even without something called a "phase-smith", objects crafted with care and passion, handled frequently, and of great significance to those that used them, could take on a sort of metaphysical heft.  It was all Greek to him, but he couldn't deny that the shield, in Steve's hands, seemed to defy the conventional laws of physics.

A loud clang caused Sam to bark at a pair of soldiers being careless with their kit.  He was rewarded by straightening posture and renewed focus.  That should hold them, and others within earshot, long enough for the hanger to clear.

But an argument was growing the next row over.  Sam sighed to himself and jogged over.  By the time he got there, an off-colour joke about the comparative intelligence of Kel-Morians had already resulted in a black eye.  Both got latrine duties for their troubles, and Sam made it abundantly clear to the joker that any similar incidents would end with an airlock and a rebreather, regardless of the friendliness of the nearest port.  One particularly lecherous ex-Commando had clung to the outside of the hull through three translocations before taking his luck with an independent shipping lane.  Sam had quietly sent a message to a local trader with an all-male crew to ensure he wasn't left drifting, but the point had been made to the rest of the crew that threats were not idle, and that if command decided that you were an overt hazard to the ship then you wouldn't be on it much longer.  It was only a step short of capital punishment, but a step Steve held to and Sam fully supported, and one of the few alternatives for wandering rebels with no permanent base of operations or supporting infrastructure beyond what the Falcon could carry.

No such warning went to the fellow who'd delivered the black eye.  Such violence couldn't be overlooked for the sake of shipboard discipline, not from a soldier, but it could be partially forgiven under the circumstances.  Nominal latrine duty and a friendly reminder about filing official complaints squared things as far as Sam was concerned.

Originally Sam had handled matters like these in private with a tribunal.  Steve however believed that, at least for incidents that occurred in public where the facts were not in question, the official response should be just as public.  There'd be no grand announcement, but anyone who saw the fight could stay to hear Sam's response.  Sam had been concerned about the fallibility of humans making snap decisions, and keeping the trust of the crew, but Steve had countered that if soldiers couldn't follow the snap decisions of their commanders then they were welcome to resign at their leisure.  "Humans make mistakes", he'd said, "but so do committees.  Better it come from a person than a faceless structure.  If they don't think you're objective enough, they know where to find me."  Somehow the thought of looking into Steve's piercing blue eyes and telling him they distrusted his chosen right hand wasn't an option most Howling Commandos took lightly.  But they did know where to find him.

Sam knew, too.  There'd be dozens of reports and debriefs waiting on the bridge, and co-ordinations to be made with few STL shuttles they'd piggybacked on their transloction, including Dr Laufeyson's personal craft, but none were urgent and right now he needed to see his Captain. 

Bridge, quarters, mess hall, or personal gym - it was rare to find him anywhere else.  He'd know if the Captain was on the bridge, so that was out, as were his quarters given the shipboard time.  If Steve had been in a good mood after the mission, he might have gone to the mess hall to celebrate with the troops.

He went to the gym.  From three doors down, the heavy thump of fist on bag told him he was right.  He entered, letting the sound of the door announce him.  Steve would acknowledge him when he was ready.

Standing in the doorway, Sam watched as his Captain laid into the heaviest bag they had with unrelenting fury.  He'd witnessed this enough times to sense Steve's mood from the sounds of his boxing, even without seeing his face.  The man had a hell of a poker face, but his fists told the truth.  There was pain their today, and rage, but not desperation.  Another punishing combo beat out its staccato on the bag - not the wild, reckless swings of someone backed into a corner, but the calculated aggression of a man determined to inflict maximum damage even at the cost of protecting himself.

The bag split, its sand poured out onto the ferrocrete floor.  In the sudden stillness, Sam could see a drop of blood fall after.  Steve's knuckles must have split too.

Another drop fell as Steve's breathing stilled.

Eventually he spoke without turning.  "He was there, Sam."  He didn't say who.  He didn't need to.

Another drop of blood fell.

"He spoke to me from somewhere on the surface tapped into the suit somehow.  Nothing... nothing relevant.  Just taunts.  Said to wait for him so he could sever the loose end.  Suit's logs should have the record, we should get the data team to check it, see if there's anything useful they can dredge up."

Sam was silent.  His Captain was deflecting, and if he took the bait then that would be the end of it. 

After a long minute, another drop fell. 

"The streets were empty when we got there.  We came in past a makeshift basketball court.  There was a kid's hoodie on the bench, with a lunchbox sitting on top."

Drop.

"I don't know if that kid is alive or dead now.  But if he's dead, I know who killed him.  And all he had for me were taunts and threats."

Drop.

"He eats worlds, Sam."

Drop.

At long last, Sam opened his mouth. "Then let's stop him. Captain."

\---------------------------

 _...Actress Kyla Velassi enters rehab. Velassi: I love you all!..._  
_...New Oakland clean-up operation in full swing..._  
_...2nd fleet regroups at Dylarian shipyards..._  
_...Palace advisors say rationing to be extended to utility items..._ _  
__...Princess Shuri to take part in naval operations..._

"Karen Page for UNN. The elusive Winter Soldier was spotted on New Oakland recently. Dr.Ikol Laufeyson, head of the renowned Mobius Foundation, had a run-in with the alien queen, but is currently unavailable for comment.  In a statement, Dr. Laufeyson credited the Howling Commandos with keeping the Winter Soldier from achieving his–

"Karen, I'm sorry to interrupt, but we have a breaking story... apparently... um, go to – go to – commercial. Please, commercial."

"What goes bump in the night? it Might be your GIFTED child. Register your child with Psi-Ops today. It's the law. It's your duty."

\---------------------------

"Oyez, oyez, the court is now in session."  Tony had the volume of his suit set to magnify, and his voice carried easily cross the bridge.

Sam glared at him.  Glimmers of humanity aside, the man was antithetical to proper military discipline, but Steve had made it clear he was to be afforded a level of tolerance far above what a normal civilian would receive.

Pick your battles, Sam.  Pick your battles.

He looked across at the other members of the unofficial inner circle.  Since the addition of Mr Barton, civilians were outnumbering active military personnel unless you counted Mr Banner's provisional rank on a dead world.  That would change if Barton signed up properly, but so far he'd declined.  Two of his Spectre associates had expressed interest though, and he was told several more were expected.  Barton had promised to stay long enough to vet them properly, but was uncommitted beyond that.

Steve, as usual, stood a little apart and simply watched as Sam opened the meeting.

"Here's the sitrep.  We're in open space, with three Slower-Than-Light transports in tow that we'll be escorting to Meinhoff, and Dr Laufeyson's private shuttle that will stay with us until the research is properly secure."  Sam looked at Banner.  "What's the status of the artifact?"

Banner blinked.  "Uh... well it's not going to kill us.  At least not imminently."

Tony snorted.  "Now that's encouraging!"

"Hey, you've seen the readouts.  That temporal-spatial dilation effect is subtle, but now that we have four together I'm having to set up phase transformers every few inches on any cables running to or from.  We're going to have to rewrite some laws of physics when this is over.  But they appear stable enough for now, and nothing we've been able to observe coming off of them is hazardous to a person or to the ship."

"Could we handle a fifth?"  Sam rather hoped they wouldn't have to, but he liked to be prepared.

Banner's face took on a pained expression and he made a noncommittal gesture in the air.  "It wouldn't be impossible, theoretically, but we'd need to move from a sequence of phase transformers to some sort of continuous system or else we aren't going to be able to pack them in tightly enough.  I've never heard of such a system, and I can't imagine another use for it.  Tony, you're better at this sort of engineering than me, how much work are we talking about here?"

"Off the top of my head, a good consulting firm might take the contract for a cool mil and a year to work on it.  Or you could double my espresso rations again and give me a couple hours."

Barton chuckled.  Sam looked plaintively to Steve.  "Why do I get the feeling that pumping that much caffeine into Tony is a greater hazard to this ship than these artifacts ever were?"

Steve just nodded, "make it happen."

Next order of business, then.  "Barton, you've been working with the data team on the files we pulled.  How are they doing?"

"Well, I can't say my field cert in cryptography is much use to them," Barton demurred, "but they're making progress.  The file structure is mapped out now, and they found a few gems already, notably a UF log file the Mobius team had already been decrypting themselves.  We haven't booted it up yet, but I've got it right here, unlocked and ready to go."

"And the rest?"

"We can probably crack it in time, but don't hold your breath.  We're ready to send Dr. Laufeyson his copies any time you're ready."

Tony's eyes flickered with feigned nonchalance.  "How is the good doctor, anyway?"

"Secure, from the sound of things", Barton replied.  He said to tell you that he, Pepper, and Betty are all at Skygeirr."

Sam saw something pass in the gaze between Barton and Tony, some secret understanding.  Tony looked away, jaw clenched.  Yet another item to look into that he'd likely never get the time for.  Instead he looked around the group.  "Any other news to report?  No?  Then let's boot up that log file and see what we've stumbled into."

 

 

_Sam's chapter will be continued..._


End file.
